How a CMU grad student turned a lab bottleneck into a startup that just raised its first $1M
For founder Bingda Li, launching a startup wasn't about chasing a hypothetical problem, it was about fixing a real one he encountered in the lab.
While studying biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, Li worked on a promising new treatment called exosome therapy to improve the success of organ transplants. But he faced a major challenge: the difficult process required growing a massive amount of cells in the lab, something that is still largely done by hand.
Li teamed up with fellow Carnegie Mellon student Xinyu Wang to build tech that could fix it. They launched Mito Robotics in 2023, aiming to accelerate the development and use of intelligent robotics in life science labs, making processes like cell culturing faster, more efficient and less reliant on manual labor.
Li teamed up with fellow Carnegie Mellon student Xinyu Wang to build tech that could fix it. They launched Mito Robotics in 2023, aiming to accelerate the development and use of intelligent robotics in life science labs, making processes like cell culturing faster, more efficient and less reliant on manual labor.
But Li's ideas of becoming an entrepreneur started much earlier. When Li came to the US from China at 14 years old, he immediately noticed how prevalent entrepreneurship was in the United States.
'I think it opened up my mind to who I wanted to be,' Li told Technical.ly. 'There's more potential than just going to work, and especially coming to Carnegie Mellon, I realized that maybe I can do something bigger through entrepreneurship.'
With just two years of experience, Li has already hit a major milestone in his journey as an entrepreneur. Earlier this year, the startup received a $1 million pre-seed investment from California-based Draper Associates, which is known for its early investments in companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Robinhood and Twitch. Now, Mito is using the money to expedite the development of its prototype.
In this edition of Technical.ly's How I Got Here series, we sat down with Li at StudioMe in Oakland to talk about the Pittsburgh-based opportunities that helped his startup grow, the challenges he faced in securing pre-seed funding and the advice he'd give his younger self.
The Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
What sparked your interest in tech and entrepreneurship?
I did my undergrad at Wake Forest University, and I majored in kinesthology and minored in biology and entrepreneurship. That's how I started getting into the entrepreneurship field. Then, when I was looking for graduate school, initially I was pre-med, but then I was getting more and more interested in entrepreneurship. I thought engineering could be more helpful to get me into entrepreneurship.
When I was doing a master's at Carnegie Mellon, I was also in another program called the Engineering and Technology Innovation Management Program. The program helped me get an idea of how to build a startup, how to manage a startup and how to solve problems in general.
I always kept my eyes open to any type of problems that I could potentially solve using advanced technology.
How has your experience as an immigrant influenced your path in the tech world?
I would say I've seen the growth of technology in both countries. Right now, when we talk about technology, the top two countries we think about are probably China and the US. Europe, Japan and Korea are doing great things as well, but from the news headlines, China and the US are really getting a lot of attention, especially in AI and robotics. Because I'm bilingual, I have the opportunity to see the news from both sides and talk to people from both sides.
What shaped me as an entrepreneur is trying to get the best out of the two countries. In China, a lot of the focus is on how to make things cost-effective. In the US, I think a lot of focus is on making the technology as advanced as possible.
When I developed my robot for lab automation, I started thinking about how I could make the robot as advanced as possible but also as accessible as possible for research labs, not only the labs that are very well funded, but also the labs that are not very well funded.
What's been the toughest challenge you've faced in your career so far, and how did you work through it?
In terms of the startup, initially, it was just fundraising. We were really looking to have resources and be supported in Pittsburgh. Initially, we were having a little bit of a hard time.
Although CMU is a great school, great name, great program, me and my cofounder Xinyu were both first-time founders and didn't have a strong portfolio behind us. A lot of people just did not believe that we could make it happen, because we're not just developing software, we're developing a robot that's bigger than the fridge in your home. But now, we already have part of the robot delivered to customers' labs, so we aim to have the full robot by the end of this year.
What kinds of opportunities or support systems have been especially valuable to you on this journey?
We had this idea of developing an intelligent robot for cell culture automation in the late fall of 2022. The first bootcamp we participated in was the kickstart customer discovery bootcamp at Carnegie Mellon University. They were organizing that as the NSF I Corp regional program, so it teaches you how to do customer discovery and things like that.
Initially, the first two years, me and my cofounder were really just focused on educating ourselves on how to do customer discovery, how to do market analysis, how to do this business analysis and talking to as many people around us as possible, just to make sure the problem that we're solving is truly a universal problem around the labs, instead of just my problems. Turns out there are a lot of complaints and people looking for solutions for automating that.
Then we also reached out to this program called Ascender. They have a lot of great programs, a lot of great educational resources. They provided a lot of those resources to us as well, and also some of the financial support for the idea and the research. That's one thing I strongly recommend for Pittsburgh-based startups or innovators that are looking for support.
What's one piece of advice you wish someone had given you earlier as a founder?
To be very confident in what you're doing, especially during the fundraising stage.
Initially, when we were reaching out to investors, telling them our ideas, I don't think we were confident enough, because they were throwing a lot of challenging questions at us, and each question was like a bullet. We had to take each of those bullets, and every time we started to question ourselves. But we had a lot of convincing data from the customer discovery side.
If I were talking to myself one year before, I would tell myself that you need to stand your ground, be much more confident, because you also know something that they don't. You talk to all these customers, all these scientists, that the investors probably didn't talk to, so they don't know the insights from all these customers.
It's not just you begging these investors to invest in you, it's that you show them the data, you show them where you are, be confident, you've been in the field for some time.
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