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From humble beginnings in 2005, Danish software company CLC bio has emerged as one of the leading software providers for the exploding genomics and next-gen sequencing market. The Danes say they aim to be "among the most innovative bioinformatics companies in the 21st century."
After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Florida, Bjarne Knudsen saw a business opportunity to improve the quality, efficiency, and user-friendliness of life science software. He returned to Denmark, recruited his brother Thomas (now CLC bio's CEO) to the cause, hired a few local software developers, and CLC bio was born.
The origin of the name is a closely guarded secret. "'Cake Loving Company' is a good guess, but it's incorrect," says CLC bio North America CEO Jan Lomholdt.
CLC bio initially took a "Microsoft approach" to bioinformatics. "Everyone has to have it on their desktop, download it from the Internet. It was global thinking from the beginning," says Lomholdt. The resulting Workbench suite, going to head to head with the likes of DNASTAR, Vector NTI, and Gene Codes, proved competitive. It was platform independent and "people could just right-click and get [GenBank] directly into their program," says Lomholdt. By 2006, CLC bio had serviced 100,000 free downloads.
Adding more functionality, CLC bio attracted its first industry customers. With next-gen sequencing platforms emerging, Lomholdt and colleagues worked with the major...