Lab Automation Robotics Startup ABLE Labs Raises $8.7M Series A

ABLE Labs, a South Korean startup specializing in laboratory automation robotics, has raised approximately $8.7 million (KRW 12.1 billion) in Series A funding, the company announced on August 31.

The round was led by Innopolis Partners and joined by Industrial Bank of Korea, Capstone Partners, Horizon Investment, Magna Investment, Futureplay, and NAU IB Capital.

ABLE Labs plans to expand its business from liquid-handling robotics to self-driving laboratories and build infrastructure for generating experimental data to train AI models.

The company has secured new quality-analysis automation projects across four industries beyond biotechnology: semiconductors, chemicals, cosmetics, and secondary batteries. Revenue in 2025 reached KRW 1.29 billion, up 113 percent year over year, while order intake in the first half of 2026 already exceeded twice the prior year’s full-year revenue.

ABLE Labs has deployed laboratory automation solutions at KAIST, Pusan National University, and the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology. The company is jointly developing an organoid-based drug evaluation platform with Johns Hopkins University in the United States. To date, the startup has carried out eight national R&D projects and secured over KRW 10 billion in government research funding over five years.

ABLE Labs is currently conducting a proof-of-concept project with a major U.S. pharmaceutical company and has completed product delivery to its first customer in Singapore.

In the South Korean lab-automation and advanced-materials market, deep-tech startups have been raising capital to scale hardware and AI-enabled R&D platforms. LABINCUBE raised $9.9M in Series B to commercialize Metal-Organic Framework materials for chemical and energy applications, while QUAD closed a pre-Series A round to bring superconducting single-photon detectors to semiconductor inspection and quantum computing markets.