When Liran Belenzon started Biz-Coupon, Israel’s first B2B e-commerce website, in 2011, he couldn’t have known that just five years later, he’d be co-founding another company halfway around the world. This time, it was Toronto-based BenchSci, a leading AI solution for research and development in biomedicine.
Just like his company, Belenzon moves fast. He’s not about speed for the sake of speed but for the sake of efficiency, as he recently noted on the AI in Business podcast. If his company is racing to do anything, it’s to distill its processes into simple building blocks for an entire industry to follow.
The first opportunity is moving quickly through tasks that would have taken far longer before the advent of AI, Belenzon said, to increase efficiency by up to 50 percent, “doing the same thing you do anyways, but way, way faster and a lot better? That's obviously something that's clear, and it's probably the low-hanging fruit.”
Those percentages add up in an environment where drug testing most often fails, not because of the underlying efficacy of the drug but because of human error in the form of overlooked or misinterpreted data. The other challenge, Belenzon says, is translating complex scientific concepts into simply defined principles rather than creating “20 or 30” different definitions of roughly the same concept.
That’s how BenchSci is leveraging AI—to whittle down progress to its most basic elements to facilitate more of the industry’s complex, groundbreaking work. Eyeing its 10th birthday, Belenzon’s company is looking as solid as ever. Maybe it’s time to forget the tech adage of “move fast and break things”—BenchSci moves fast and makes them. If that sounds like a better way, it’s because it is.
