SynBioBeta Speaker
Chase Olle
Robot on Rails
Founder & CEO
Chase Olle trained as a Mechanical Engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Bachelor of Science in 2013 and a Master of Engineering in Manufacturing in 2014. During his education, he operated as an independent design consultant under the name MonkeyBox Design, where he built prototype hardware for early-stage startups. Projects included variable-resistance free weights, a digital picture frame, and a universal screwdriver, providing early exposure to rapid prototyping, manufacturability, and customer-driven design constraints.
Chase’s first professional role out of graduate school focused on developing a vision-guided robotic arm for automated film transfer of pyrolytic graphite at AvCarb. This work introduced him to unstructured automation challenges, vision-based alignment, and the reliability constraints of industrial robotic systems operating outside of tightly controlled environments.
He later joined Adcole, where his early career centered on high-precision metrology for automotive manufacturers including General Motors, Volkswagen, and Toyota. At Adcole, Chase led R&D projects spanning camshaft and crankshaft measurement systems, 3D optical surface scanning, and high-speed gear profile measurement using air-bearing-based architectures. This work emphasized calibration rigor, repeatability, and field reliability at production scale.
In 2017, Chase transitioned into biotechnology, joining Dale Thomas at Mytide, a peptide synthesis company. His work focused on peptide synthesis workflows and the automation of downstream processing steps. It was during this period that Chase experienced, firsthand frustration with the limitations of existing lab automation technologies. He observed that, relative to automotive manufacturing, biotechnology lagged significantly in flexible, scalable automation.
This experience inspired him to found Robot on Rails.
SynBioBeta 2026 Tickets are Live
Confirmed Speakers
Sessions Featuring
Chase
This Year
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AIxBIO
Data Factories: Building the Infrastructure for AI-Ready Biology
Biology is entering an AI-driven era, but most experimental infrastructure still produces data designed for individual experiments, not for learning at scale. As a result, much of today’s data is useful in the moment but poorly suited for training robust, long-lived models. This session will explore what biological data matters most today, what data needs to be generated now to support future models, and how leading teams are closing that gap. Panelists will discuss how automation, metadata discipline, and standardized testing pipelines can turn artisanal lab workflows into continuous experiment-to-learning systems. The focus will be on infrastructure and experimental design, highlighting practical bottlenecks, emerging best practices, and what becomes possible when biology produces abundant, high-quality, model-ready data by default.
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Ori Zakin
BioRaptor
CEO
Building bioprocess R&D operating systems from noisy data.
Michael Koeris
DARPA
Director, BTO
Protecting National Security with Biology
Chase Olle
Robot on Rails
Founder & CEO
MIT-trained lab-robotics founder automating bench experiments at scale.
Michelle Chen
Form Bio
Pres, CEO & Board Mem.
Barry Bunin
CDD
Founder & CEO
Invented CDD Vault, data-sharing platform for drug discovery.
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AIxBIO
Data Factories: Building the Infrastructure for AI-Ready Biology
Biology is entering an AI-driven era, but most experimental infrastructure still produces data designed for individual experiments, not for learning at scale. As a result, much of today’s data is useful in the moment but poorly suited for training robust, long-lived models. This session will explore what biological data matters most today, what data needs to be generated now to support future models, and how leading teams are closing that gap. Panelists will discuss how automation, metadata discipline, and standardized testing pipelines can turn artisanal lab workflows into continuous experiment-to-learning systems. The focus will be on infrastructure and experimental design, highlighting practical bottlenecks, emerging best practices, and what becomes possible when biology produces abundant, high-quality, model-ready data by default.
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Ori Zakin
BioRaptor
CEO
Building bioprocess R&D operating systems from noisy data.
Michael Koeris
DARPA
Director, BTO
Protecting National Security with Biology
Chase Olle
Robot on Rails
Founder & CEO
MIT-trained lab-robotics founder automating bench experiments at scale.
Michelle Chen
Form Bio
Pres, CEO & Board Mem.
Barry Bunin
CDD
Founder & CEO
Invented CDD Vault, data-sharing platform for drug discovery.
Session lineup still growing
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
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Human Health
From Cells to Patients: Solving the Scale Mismatch in Virtual Biology
Drug discovery often measures biology at the cell level while interventions work at the tissue, organ, or whole-patient scale. This mismatch can make accurate cell-level predictions irrelevant in the clinic. This session dives into strategies to bridge that gap: multiscale modeling that nests single-cell dynamics within organ-level simulations, spatial transcriptomics that preserve context, and surrogate models that translate cell-level outputs into clinical biomarkers. Speakers will ask: how do we ensure virtual biology reflects not just what cells do in isolation, but how biology behaves in the real complexity of patients?
Purchase Pass
Featuring
Speaker Coming Soon
