Benchling, the R&D Cloud powering the biotechnology industry, announced the appointment of new executive leadership to its engineering and field organizations. These hires come at the same time as the company achieved significant financial milestones. In the first half of its fiscal year, Benchling surpassed 1,000 customers and increased subscription revenue 90% year-over-year. Dollar-based net expansion was greater than 150%, indicative of customers rapidly growing their use of the R&D Cloud.
Benchling appointed Stephen Deasy as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer. He has 20 years of experience scaling platform, infrastructure, and product engineering teams at high-growth software companies. Deasy will be responsible for leading Benchling’s technology strategy and growing its engineering team. While at Atlassian, he led the cloud platform and infrastructure groups before his role expanded to encompass all of the product engineering, including products such as Jira, Confluence, and Trello. He played a key role in Atlassian’s transition to the cloud and in scaling the global engineering organization during his six-year tenure. Prior to Atlassian, he led engineering teams at Groupon, VMware, and EMC.
“We are honored to hear our customers — from emerging startups to Fortune 500 — tell us that Benchling is becoming the standard for cutting-edge biotechnology R&D,” said Sajith Wickramasekara, co-founder and CEO of Benchling. “We are investing in expanding our R&D Cloud. Our customers are pushing into new scientific frontiers and the R&D Cloud enables them to bring transformative products to market, faster. The addition of Stephen to our leadership team will position us to accelerate this goal while continuing to build a world-class engineering organization.”
“In my career, the things that I’ve enjoyed most are being close to technology as it scales and building out the people-power behind that scale,” said Stephen Deasy, Chief Technology Officer at Benchling. “I was drawn to Benchling because of the opportunity to work with a talented, mission-driven team to build the biotech industry’s only modern and connected R&D platform.”