Bionomous: The Venture Leader Biotech creating innovative micro-engineering solutions for miniature biological entities

22.08.2022 10:30, Tracy Woodley

This fall, the Venture Leaders Biotech will represent Swiss innovation in the United States. To select the 10 featured startups, a jury of professional investors and medtech experts reviewed 90 applications. These startups improve diagnostics, treatments, and well-being with innovative solutions that cover artificial intelligence, sensors, smart devices, and robotics. Allow us to introduce you to each of the Venture Leaders Biotech 2022 ahead of the September 2022 roadshow in Boston and Cambridge: Meet Frank Bonnet, the CEO and co-founder of Bionomous.

Name: Frank Bonnet 
Location: Préverenges, Vaud 
Nationality: Swiss 
Graduated from: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Ph.D., 2017
Job title: CEO and co-founder of Bionomous
Number of employees: 10 
Money raised: CHF 2 million 
First touchpoint with Venturelab: Business creation training, 2018  

Explain in one or two short sentences what your startup does and why. 
We develop and commercialize laboratory instruments to automate the screening and sorting of miniature entities to accelerate research. 

How and where did you come up with the idea for your startup?
During my Ph.D., I was developing robotic tools to study the behavior of zebrafish. While performing the experiments with our research partners, I noticed the pain some technicians had to handle the zebrafish embryos to breed zebrafish, and we decided with a colleague to develop a technology for it. 

What do you expect from the Venture Leaders roadshow, and how will it help you achieve your vision?
Get to know the Boston start-up ecosystems from the inside and grow our network in the US. Our company is already active in the US, with existing paying customers and an office at MassRobotics in Boston, but we want to further develop our marketing and sales strategy in the US and hopefully partner with US investors to participate in our Series A round. 

Who does your product or solution help, and how?
It helps research institutions, CROs, and pharmaceutical companies that work with a large number of entities for research purposes on a daily basis, especially in the Biotech area. Our product allows us to save valuable human time, increase the experiment speed and standardize some processes, while also saving costs. Our product also has many applications in larger industries, such as aquaculture and agriculture, to assess the quality of fish eggs and crops. 

What are you most excited about at work right now?
Our product is now at the commercialization stage, and we are facing a lot of traction from customers, from the market we already identified but also from other verticals. This is very exciting of course, as it demonstrates that our technology has a lot of potential and can contribute to better research, but also scary as our team has to follow this traction and deliver the right products for our customers. 

How did you build your team?
I find the complementary components that are missing on the team at the time being. These can be from technical/professional skills, behavior (introvert vs extravert), and gender (to try to achieve somehow gender balance even if in technological companies this is challenging..) in order to have the right balance within the team. 

Which market are you addressing and what is the potential of your startup?
Research institutions, Life sciences, Biotech, CROs, and Pharmaceutical companies are the primary markets we are addressing now. However, we see also some traction in some larger industries, like aquaculture for instance, where biological entities such as fish eggs must be inspected and sorted for quality assessment, thus we currently target a total global market of 5 BCHF. 

What are your key achievements to date?
CHF 400,000 of cumulated revenues since the start of the company, thanks to our early adopters that trusted us and to a team that managed to deliver the right products for the customers.

Customers already in two continents (Europe and US), thanks to an efficient online marketing strategy 

Raised ~2MCHF of non-dilutive and equity fund while being a Swiss company producing hardware.

What is one thing not many people know about you?
I love gardening. I have a 10 m2 garden at home which I optimize to be maximum productive, producing approximately ~30 kg of vegetables per year and consuming only organic waste. 

What is your favorite book and why?
l’île mystérieuse by Jules Verne. I am a big fan of Jules Vernes’ books, his style to use literature to teach science, and the attitude and exemplary of the heroes, and L’ile mystérieuse is my favorite one. It is also always fun to read these books and compare the scientific knowledge of the old time and our time, see in which area we made some great progress, and see where we sometimes seem to have forgotten where we come from.  

How did you come up with the name of your startup?
In the shower, trying to find a nice combination of what we do: (autonomous systems) and our main application at the moment (Biology) -> Bionomous 

Which startup do you wish you had founded and why?
ToGoodToGo. I think the biggest concern our world is facing are currently environmental change and biodiversity loss, and one big part of the problem is the waste of energy and products in general, for which we spend a lot of energy for almost nothing in return. I have big issues with startups promising to save these issues with tech that often end up doing greenwashing and not really reducing the problems, unfortunately, but TooGoodToGo is one great example that managed to create some value of a major issue of the world, the waste of fresh products, that benefits to everybody at the end (customers, product providers, the planet…), and that ended up in a profitable business. 

What is the most challenging aspect of being a founder?
You need to spend your day selling, to customers, investors, your staff, and any stakeholder in general, focusing always on different selling arguments. When you succeed in your “sale” this is a fantastic feeling, but when you fail this can be quite frustrating, also because you never know if you failed because of the things you are selling or just because of the way you tried to sell it (or sometimes both…) 

The Venture Leaders Biotech program is co-organized by Venturelab and Swissnex Boston and supported by Debiopharm, EPFL Lausanne, ETH Zurich, EY - Ernst & Young, Swiss Biotech Association, VISCHER, Hansjörg Wyss, and Venture Leaders alum Ulf Grawunder.