Overview
Liran Belenzon is chief executive officer of BenchSci, a company building AI infrastructure that drug discovery has been missing so good science never gets lost to a system that should know better. BenchSci’s about page traces its origin to 2015, when PhD student Tom Leung lost rare patient samples because of a bad antibody — a systemic failure where scientific evidence to choose the right antibody existed in literature but could not be found in time.
Belenzon, an MBA candidate working at the Creative Destruction Lab, cold-messaged the founding team to apply to the accelerator and joined as co-founder and CEO a few weeks in per BenchSci’s official origin story.
Role and company
As CEO, Belenzon leads BenchSci’s evolution from AI-assisted antibody selection to ASCEND reasoning platforms and EMET — an agentic research environment that reasons and acts like a team of PhD scientists, purpose-built for preclinical R&D. BenchSci’s leadership page lists Belenzon alongside Chief Science Officer Tom Leung, Chief Data Officer Elvis Wianda, PhD, and CTO John Jackson.
Sixteen of the top 20 pharma companies use BenchSci per its timeline, with over 50,000 scientists across 4,500 research centers worldwide cited on the about page.
Background and career context
Belenzon joined BenchSci from the Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto as an MBA candidate per the company origin narrative. None of the original scientific co-founders had built a company before; Belenzon brought commercial leadership to a prototype that could read scientific papers the way a PhD scientist reads them and extract experimental evidence buried inside.
BenchSci’s about page frames Belenzon’s CEO role as translating laboratory frustration into enterprise pharma infrastructure — a positioning distinct from consumer-facing AI products.
Company-building or leadership context
Under Belenzon, BenchSci raised Series C ($50M, Project Butterfly disease biology map), Series D ($70M led by Generation Investment Management, total investment over $200M), and launched EMET agentic workbench in 2025 per company timeline. The thesis evolved from productivity tool to infrastructure for how drug discovery gets done.
Belenzon remains CEO on BenchSci’s leadership page through EMET launch — signaling continuity as the product shifted from search to agentic reasoning for preclinical teams.
Public milestones
2015: BenchSci founded at Creative Destruction Lab, University of Toronto. 2017: First product AI-Assisted Antibody Selection launched. 2022: Project Butterfly — evidence-backed map of disease biology with $50M Series C. 2023: ASCEND reasoning platform and $70M Series D. 2025: EMET agentic research workbench launched per BenchSci about timeline.
Google’s Gradient Ventures, F-Prime, Inovia Capital, and TCV appear in BenchSci’s investor history on the cited about page.
Why their work matters
BenchSci under Belenzon addresses a pre-AI pain point — scientists cannot find experimental evidence fast enough to prevent wasted wet-lab work. EMET extends that mission into agentic AI that acts on structured disease biology maps, testing whether pharma R&D teams will trust AI agents with literature-grounded reasoning in target selection workflows.
For healthcare AI coverage, BenchSci is drug-discovery infrastructure rather than clinical workflow AI, but shares enterprise pharma adoption dynamics with clinical AI vendors.
Sources and references
Primary sourcing: BenchSci About page with origin story and leadership roster, reviewed July 10, 2026.
- BenchSci — About (benchsci.com)
Funding rounds and user counts from BenchSci official timeline only.