Revolutionizing Robotics and Winning Startup of the Year 2023

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology and innovation, startups continually emerge with groundbreaking ideas to reshape industries. This year over 600,000+ votes for the best startups from across the tech community on HackerNoon determined that Vitality Robotics is Durham, North Carolina’s 2023 Startup of the Year! In this blog post, we delve into the journey of Vitality Robotics, their innovative contributions to the field of robotics, and what it means to them to be named as HackerNoon’s 2023 Startup of the Year.

The Genesis of Vitality: Vitality was founded in 2021 with the mission to expedite biomedical breakthroughs using artificial intelligence. After working in pre-clinical laboratories running animal trials, our founder Dr. Joe Webb, PhD saw the opportunity to enhance reproducibility of preclinical research and eliminate human error using robotics paired with machine learning.

Revolutionizing Science: Vitality’s initial idea was simple: How can we automate scientific experiments with machine learning? By partnering with organizations to create customized machine learning software, Vitality designed Labtools.AI - a SaaS platform to automate training scientific machine learning models for visual data, NGS samples, and flow cytometry data. Outside of our SaaS platform, Vitality Robotics has introduced several groundbreaking hard tech innovations that have garnered attention globally:

Precise Organ Excision Technology (POET) Devices: Our patented bench top surgical devices fully automate traditional in vivo techniques such as necropsies, biopsies, injections and ear tagging. Using precision robotics, our flagship devices allow laboratory technicians to place rodents into an anesthesia chamber and launch automated surgical protocols and receive barcoded/labeled samples with data tracked on our cloud.

Rendering of the POET benchtop surgical device

ELN/LIMS Integrations: Our SaaS platform Labtools.AI integrates with the most common ELN/LIMs providing your scientists with a no-code user-friendly experience for automating laboratory processes. We provide custom machine learning development and deployment on our Labtools API so your lab can count bacterial colonies, track cellular movement from time lapse imaging, and work with our machine learning engineers to design custom models for your specific application. This seamlessly integrates with all of the Vitality hardware, so our devices can easily push data to your favorite platform keeping your analysis in the same systems you use today. If we don’t offer an integrated solution with your current software systems, we will work with you to add it to our ever growing list of integrations.

Labtools.AI No-code workflow builder

Computer Vision & Machine Learning: Our machine learning engineers have worked with laboratories to create custom machine learning models for C. Elegans tracking, NLP models for DNA sequence classification & forecasting models for inventory usage and demand planning. We are continually growing the list of machine learning tools we offer on our platform including digital H&E staining models, and soon we will launch label free flow cytometry analyses in late 2024.

Digital segmentation and tracking of neuronal cell time lapse imaging

Recognition and Accolades: In 2023, Vitality Robotics was nominated as the Durham "Startup of the Year" with hundreds of votes from the tech community. Vitality also previously received NC IDEA grants, and was invited into AWS Activate & NVIDIA Inception.

As we look forward into 2024, Vitality will continue to push the boundaries of technology and redefine the role of automation for science. While the machine learning landscape is ever changing, one thing is certain – the future looks incredibly promising with Vitality Robotics at the helm.