Whelix
Boston-based startup (formerly Mito Robotics) building AI-powered robotic platforms for autonomous end-to-end cell culture maintenance in life science labs.
Whelix (formerly Mito Robotics) is a Boston, Massachusetts-based robotics company founded by Bingda Li (CEO) and Xinyu Wang (CTO), both of whom trained at Carnegie Mellon University. The company builds intelligent, compact, and affordable robotic platforms designed to automate wet lab cell culture—a labor-intensive process that has historically required constant manual attention from researchers.
The company's founding motivation came from Bingda Li's PhD experience in biomedical engineering at CMU, where repetitive pipetting, contamination risks, and around-the-clock incubation checks consumed significant researcher time. Whelix was built to remove these manual bottlenecks while improving experimental consistency, throughput, and reproducibility.
Whelix offers two primary products: Teknician and Associan. Teknician is the company's AI-powered liquid-handling core—described as the first such platform compatible with both flasks (T75, T175 sizes) and well plates. It incorporates Willow, an AI agent that converts natural language instructions into validated, executable laboratory protocols, enabling researchers to program the system without specialized robotics expertise. Teknician is available as a standalone benchtop unit.
Associan is the full autonomous workcell built around Teknician. It integrates Teknician with an automated incubator, refrigerator, heat bath, robotic gripper, and waste-management system. Associan supports more than 45 flasks across multiple standard brands and well plates, enabling either large-scale cell expansion—producing more than 1 billion cells per run—or parallel expansion of 45 or more distinct cell lines simultaneously. The system uses computer vision to monitor robotic operations and experimental conditions continuously, detecting errors and deviations in real time.
Whelix secured a $1 million pre-seed investment led by Draper Associates. The company is a resident startup at MassRobotics in Boston and was selected for the 2026 MassRobotics Healthcare Robotics Startup Catalyst Program, a five-month mentorship program. It targets pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, contract research organizations, and academic research institutions as its primary customers.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
Teknician
AI-powered liquid-handling benchtop platform for automated cell culture in T75/T175 flasks and well plates.
Associan
Autonomous cell culture workcell integrating Teknician with incubator, refrigerator, gripper and waste system for 24/7 operation.
Contact Whelix
WEBSITE
https://www.whelix.coHEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2023
Primary Role
Manufacturer
Company Size
-
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
-
Funding Total
-
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