Able Labs, a South Korean robotics-based laboratory automation company, has closed a Series A round of KRW 12.1 billion ,exceeding the KRW 10 billion target it had set when the raise opened.
The round was led by Innopolis Partners, with seven institutions participating in total: IBK (Industrial Bank of Korea), Capstone Partners, Horizon Investment, Magna Investment, FuturePlay, and NAU IB Capital joined alongside the lead investor.
Founded in 2021 and led by CEO Shin Sang, Able Labs is a Korean company that develops robots and software to automate liquid-handling processes in biology and life-science laboratories — replacing the manual work of researchers using pipettes to transfer precise volumes of reagents. The company says its robotic systems achieve a liquid-handling error rate of about 1.5%, compared with the 5.7–8.1% error rate typical of even skilled human researchers performing the same task manually.
Able Labs is expanding beyond simple process automation toward what it calls a “Self-Driving Lab” platform, in which AI designs experimental conditions, robots carry out the resulting experiments, and the results are fed back into the AI system for further learning — creating a closed-loop system for automated scientific discovery. The company is also building infrastructure to generate high-quality experimental data specifically for training AI models. Beyond its original focus on biotech, Able Labs has been winning automation contracts for quality analysis in semiconductors, chemicals, cosmetics, and secondary batteries, broadening its addressable market beyond life sciences. The company is currently conducting a proof-of-concept (PoC) with a major U.S. pharmaceutical company and has completed its first customer delivery in Singapore.
Able Labs said it will use the new capital to advance its Self-Driving Lab platform and its AI training-data infrastructure, while expanding into global markets. The company plans to build out sales channels in the United States and Europe and to expand its R&D workforce to support that international growth.
