Benchling Hires Richard Wong as CFO and Zach Powers as CISO

SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Benchling, the leading life sciences R&D cloud, today announced that a series of executives have joined the company, including senior leaders with previous experience at LinkedIn and Salesforce, as CFO and CISO. The expanded executive team will play an instrumental role as Benchling rapidly expands to accelerate research and development in the largest biopharmaceutical, agricultural, and industrial enterprises around the world.

Richard Wong joins as CFO; he was previously a senior executive at LinkedIn and over eight years, grew the business from pre-IPO to $5B+ in revenue. Under his leadership, LinkedIn won IR Magazine's "IPO of the Year" award and was later acquired by Microsoft. He most recently served as the first CFO at Houzz. Richard will build out financial operations to support Benchling's ambitious growth plans that include new products and global support.

Zach Powers joins as CISO; he previously served as a senior security executive at Salesforce where he brought modern cloud security to enterprises and most recently was CIO and CISO at One Medical Group. He brings a wealth of knowledge from building security programs from the ground up.

"Benchling has a track record of meeting high standards for security, privacy, and compliance for some of the world's biggest enterprises," said Powers. "Just as Salesforce was a trailblazer in bringing cloud to the enterprise, Benchling is doing the same for life science R&D. Our vision is to remain one of the most trusted cloud computing companies in life science."

"Richard and Zach are exceptional leaders from some of the best cloud companies in the world. They have experience scaling technology organizations while maintaining the highest standards of trust and compliance" said Saji Wickramasekara, CEO and Co-Founder of Benchling. "With them on board, Benchling is strongly positioned for its next stage of growth."

In the past year, Benchling has added a roster of cloud and biotech leaders to its executive team.

• Meg Makalou, former Chief People Officer at the Climate Corporation, joined as VP of People.
• Malay Gandhi, previously SVP of Business Operations at Evidation Health and CEO of Rock Health, joined as Head of Strategy.
• Ricardo Vélez, previously VP of Business Affairs and General Counsel at Lookout, joined as General Counsel.

About Benchling
Benchling is the first R&D cloud platform powering the life science industry, helping the next generation of scientists make breakthrough discoveries and bring them to market faster than ever before. Multinational pharmaceutical corporations, high-growth biotechnology companies and major research institutions alike trust Benchling to speed collaboration and convert the complexity of life sciences into world-changing results. More than 300,000 scientists and 1,000 R&D organizations have adopted Benchling's cloud platform, including Gilead Sciences, Sanofi, Regeneron and Corteva Agriscience. For more, please visit benchling.com.

SOURCE Benchling