Bingda Li

Bingda Li is the Co-Founder and CEO of Whelix, a Boston-based company developing intelligent robotics for lab automation. Whelix is tackling one of biology’s biggest bottlenecks: cell culture, a highly manual workflow performed by scientists in over 450,000 labs worldwide. The inspiration for Whelix came directly from Bingda’s own Ph.D. research in Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

After spending countless hours hand-culturing cells and dealing with low yields, inconsistent quality, and frequent contamination, he partnered with Xinyu Wang from CMU’s Robotics Institute to build a better way. Together, they developed a robotic agent for end-to-end automation and spun the technology out of CMU, bringing a compact, flexible, and affordable robotic platform to research labs everywhere.