Opentrons aims to democratize lab access with its Flex robot

Two words stood out whilst Opentrons CEO Jon Brennan-Badal and investor Vinod Khosla spoke about research: reproducibility and repeatability. These are, of course, important concepts in the world of research. They’re keys to successful experimentation, but a lot of different variables can stand between them and researchers.

It’s one of the foundational promises of Opentrons’ new Flex system. What if research parameters could be programmed into a machine, making it easier to reproduce conditions?

“A great example would be if Nature had to publish an article,” Khosla tells TechCrunch. “We see so much about irreproducible data or fudged data and all that. They could literally run the same experiments and say to the author, ‘submit the software script to run that experiment.”