Case Study: Benchling achieves 90% faster CRISPR searches and scales to hundreds of genomes with Amazon Web Services

Benchling - Customer Case Study

Benchling is a San Francisco–based life-science R&D software company that helps scientists design, organize, and share experiments and molecular analyses. The company needed much faster CRISPR off-target searches and better scalability: its previous setup used multiple servers with genomes on disk, splitting searches across servers (about 30 seconds per search), which limited growth and incurred high idle costs as demand varied.

Benchling rearchitected the search pipeline to run serverlessly on AWS Lambda (with genomes in S3 and supporting services like EC2, RDS, and ElastiCache), splitting genomes into parallel Lambda tasks that perform queries and combine results. The change cut CRISPR search times by 90%, scaled support to hundreds of genomes and far higher monthly search volumes, saved thousands of dollars in monthly infrastructure costs, and freed engineers to focus on product development.

Benchling

Vineet Gopal

Engineering Manager