OUR belief

To truly enable today’s biologists, automation needs to be built from the ground up.

OUR story

Volta Labs was spun out of MIT in 2018 with the simple mission of building biological automation from the ground up.

Volta is in the proximity of Kendall Square, known as "the most innovative square mile on the planet". Being part of the open biotech culture in Kendall Square made us realize that today’s biologists are held back by the limitations of existing automation tools. With DNA sequencing in particular, we observed that the advances in DNA readout technologies had moved further along than the advances in the upstream steps of preparing samples for sequencing (sample prep).

What started out as a simple printed circuit board to manipulate colored droplets at the MIT Media Lab during co-founder Udayan Umapathi’s graduate work was quickly directed toward solving the “sample prep bottleneck”. The company raised Seed Funding from top VCs in 2019.

Since then, we have been heads down in the lab inventing and building novel fluidic and sample manipulation technologies. We take an anti-disciplinary approach to solve very hard problems and weave together instrumentation, fluidics, software, biology and chemistry. While our current focus is on sequencing sample prep, we envision a new approach where a single universal machine automates most biological workflows in genomics, proteomics and synthetic biology.

Mar 2018
Jan 2019
Apr 2019
Apr 2021
Jan 2022
Mar 2018

Volta Labs is incorporated and launches from MIT

Jan 2019

Volta Labs participates in Y Combinator Winter 2019

April 2019

Volta Labs secures Seed Funding from Y Combinator, E14 Funds, Maverick Ventures and Village Global

April 2021

Rapid and iterative development culture leads to technology demonstration with first customer deployment

January 2022

Team grows to the size of 22 anti-disciplinary engineers and scientists

Our values

We innovate continually and learn by doing.

We take the approach of diving into problems at hand. Often this means creating perturbations in the system and measuring the outcome to figure out next steps instead of solely relying on ideating.

We seek to learn and grow, individually and collectively.

Like everything that survives and thrives in nature, we constantly evolve. We openly discuss the good and the bad. We do not shy away from our mistakes, rather we seek to learn and grow, individually and collectively.

We lift each other up and leverage collective genius.

We are tackling some of the most challenging problems that span many domains of engineering, software, biology and chemistry. We work together with open-mindedness and solve problems via collaborative discussions.

If you are passionate about building powerful tools for biology, we would love to hear from you!

Get in touch