24Haymarket, a private capital firm focused on growth equity and venture capital investments in the UK, and Forward Partners, an early-stage investor focused on applied AI, marketplaces and e-commerce, have invested in Clustermarket, the SAAS-enabled marketplace for laboratories and equipment. Existing investors such as industry heavyweights Jonathan Milner and Bruce Barclay also participated in the USD3.5 million round.
Clustermarket’s mission is to transform scientific research and development by building the world’s leading operating system for scientists. Their cloud-based lab management software helps organisations to manage resources and activities across their facilities, providing a clear overview of scientific equipment, laboratory bookings and technical service orders, and allows teams to communicate easily with each other. The software creates transparency within institutions and links to Clustermarket’s online equipment sharing platform, which provides access to thousands of scientific instruments and the best service providers, helping organisation to make the best use of their existing resources by offering access to lab equipment and technical services to other organisations.
Clustermarket lists over 70,000 scientific instruments on its platform, including highly specialised instruments such as state of the art microscopes, flow cytometers, and sequencing machines, but also PCR machines, centrifuges and others. With over 20 per cent user growth month on month over the past 18 months, Clustermarket is growing rapidly.
The Company’s software is used by more than 60,000 scientists across research laboratories in life science companies and universities around the world, including Illumina, Artios Pharma, Tessa Therapeutics, Evonetix, and universities: MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Imperial College London and Cambridge and Oxford.Clustermarket also recently started working with the AstraZeneca BioVentureHub, with the aim to provide a digital solution for their open and collaborative ecosystem. Meanwhile equipment manufacturers can leverage the Clustermarket platform to monitor the performance and maintenance of IoT-connected equipment used in laboratories, ensuring an optimal performance of the equipment for the researchers.
Clustermarket CEO Johannes Solzbach says: “Our software helps institutions to better manage and utilise their assets, increasing efficiencies within labs and informing future investment. With so much money pouring into life sciences and research, in particular after Covid, organisations want to make sure the impact of their equipment and future investment is maximised. We’re delighted to welcome our new investors as we look to scale up our business considerably in the near future, adding more equipment and users to build our network and data pool.”
Alan Jamieson, Investor Director representing 24Haymarket, says: “It is a very exciting prospect to support this management team as they use this new investment to build resources and capabilities across the business. This will accelerate the penetration of labs and users globally and allow us to facilitate the enhanced services that the internet of things offers both labs and equipment suppliers.”
Forward Partners CEO Nic Brisbourne says: “Clustermarket fits neatly into the type of company we like to partner with: a digital marketplace that is addressing friction and boosting efficiencies – in this case in the scientific and medical research space – a huge market that is even more crucial in the wake of the pandemic. By partnering with Clustermarket we hope to be able to support future growth, not only via capital, but with the hands-on support we offer from our investment team and our Studio.”
