Cristian Ponce was wearing an Indiana Jones costume when he met his co-founder Theo Schafer. It was at a Halloween party in 2023 thrown by Entrepreneur First, a startup program that introduces founders to one another before they launch an idea. The two hit it off, Ponce remembers. Schafer had studied at MIT with a masters in underwater autonomous robots and worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab exploring Jupiter's moons for alien life. 'Crazy stuff,' Ponce grins. 'I was coming from Cal Tech, doing bioengineering' where he worked on E. coli. The two bonded over stories about the drudgery of being a lab technician. Ponce (pictured above left) especially complained about all the manual labor involved in genetic engineering. The lowly lab tech can spend hours with a scientific syringe 'pipette,' manually moving liquids from tube to tube. Attempts to automate the process have not taken off because the robots capable of doing it are specialized, expensive, and require special programming...
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