Berkeley Lights: Technology Can Take Years to Find a Breakthrough Use
Company founded: 2011
Founders: UC Berkeley Professor Ming Wu (UC Berkeley Ph.D., 1988, MS, 1986, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering), Igor Khandros, William Davidow
Sometimes the market application for an innovative new technology takes years to identify and even more years to successfully commercialize. That’s the moral of the story with a UC Berkeley nanofluidic technology and the startup Berkeley Lights.
Ming C. Wu is a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer science. As of 2024, he was an inventor on thirty-five patents and a serial entrepreneur, having cofounded three companies.1 In the early 2000s, Wu received US government grants to fund research to “marry nanotechnology with therapeutics” that leveraged his UC lab team’s expertise in silicon photonics, optoelectronics, nanophotonics, optical MEMS, and optofluidics. By the mid 2000s that basic research led to the development of a nanofluidic technology that uses light to individually control massive amounts of cells.
However, Wu wasn’t sure how this innovative optoelectronic cell positioning technology could be applied to real-world problems until a serendipitous lunch meeting years later. Wu had been on the scientific advisory board of the startup FormFactor, which had grown to become the world’s leading supplier of advanced wafer probe cards and engineering probe systems. FormFactor went public in 2003, and several years later the company’s founder and CEO, Igor Khandros, was on the UC Berkeley campus taking philosophy classes. During a lunch together at UC Berkeley’s faculty club, Khandros asked Wu about his research. Wu showed his optoelectronic positioning technology. Fortunately, according to Wu, “the technology is very visual. It’s recorded. You can see the action on a video clip. So Khandros got enamored with the technology, and figured there had to be some application for it.”
Around that time Wu had been talking to several biotech companies to see if they wanted to collaborate on exploring applications of the technology. “The companies were skeptical,” Wu said. “They’d ask what the technology was good for . . . the companies were thinking in the traditional mode, and asking what biotech steps could the technology replace? But the technology was a whole new approach. So it didn’t replace any steps.”
Wu and Khandros continued to discuss the optofluidic technology, and in 2011, they launched Berkeley Lights Inc. (BLI). Khandros was the founding CEO, and Wu took a one-year leave of absence from the university to work full-time at the startup. Wu characterized the EECS department’s attitude toward his entrepreneurship adventure as encouraging but hoping that he’d eventually return to his campus faculty position.
BLI launched its operations in a one-story portable building on the western edge of the city of Berkeley, along the San Francisco Bay, across from the Golden Gate Bridge. The startup exclusively licensed the patent rights from UC Berkeley and was funded with $4 million from Khandros and his angel investor colleagues.
In search of potential applications, BLI showed a rudimentary demonstration of the optofluidic technology to biotech industry experts, which led to applications in antibody-based drug discovery. By 2013, BLI had a full-scale prototype and in 2016, introduced the first commercial version of a revolutionary platform that enabled functional testing at the single-cell level in a fraction of the time and costs. However, Wu soon learned (what his experienced BLI colleagues had already known) that “it’s not easy to disrupt an incumbent technology. The industry’s scientists had been using the current technology for decades. They were confident of its efficacy, and anything new needed to be proven against the gold standard. So it took years to measure up to the conventional technology.” Eventually BLI’s solution was capable of sorting, cloning, culturing, and analyzing antibody secretions of tens of thousands of single cells on a single optofluidic chip, and the platform was on track to be used by pharmaceutical companies for antibody discovery, cell line development, and synthetic biology.
In July 2020, during the early peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, BLI went public at a billion-dollar valuation. The company’s technology was subsequently used to combat COVID-19, which Wu was especially proud of.2 After his leave of absence from UC Berkeley, Wu was a scientific advisor to BLI and remained on its board of directors until the startup’s IPO. When Wu returned to UC Berkeley (heeding the advice from his EECS department colleagues), he subsequently became a Bakar Fellow (profiled in this chapter) based on his research with large-scale silicon photonic switches for data center applications. In 2020, always an entrepreneur, Wu cofounded nEye Systems (with Khandros as an investor and board member) to commercialize that switching technology.
1 In addition to Berkeley Lights, Ming cofounded OMM, Inc. in 1997 to commercialize MEMS optical switches, and nEye Systems, Inc. in 2020 to commercialize silicon photonic MEMS switches.
2 “Researchers Worldwide Are Using Berkeley Lights' Beacon Platform To Combat COVID-19,” PR Newswire, February 28, 2020, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/researchers-worldwide-are-using-berkeley-lights-beacon-platform-to-combat-covid-19-301013181.html.
Published in Startup Campus: How UC Berkeley Became an Unexpected Leader in Entrepreneurship and Startups, August 2025
