Case Study: Benchling achieves 90% faster CRISPR searches with AWS Lambda

Benchling - Customer Case Study

Benchling, a San Francisco-based life science software company, needed a faster and more scalable way to run CRISPR off-target searches across growing numbers of genomes. Its previous server-based setup was slow, hard to scale on demand, and costly to maintain during off-peak hours. Using AWS Lambda as part of its AWS cloud environment, Benchling wanted to speed up research workflows without provisioning and managing more servers.

AWS Lambda enabled Benchling to split CRISPR searches into parallel tasks, with each function pulling genome data from Amazon S3, performing the query, and returning results. This serverless approach cut CRISPR search times by 90%, helped Benchling scale to hundreds of genomes and over 100 supported organisms, and saved the company thousands of dollars each month while freeing engineers to focus on new features instead of infrastructure.

Benchling

Vineet Gopal

Engineering Manager