2019: A Year

in Review

The end of the year? Already? We felt it went pretty fast, however, we had a great time and want to share some of our success stories with you:

2019 was the year Labforward GmbH was created, by uniting Labfolder and Cubuslab. Creating one company with one mission: to connect the laboratory environment. Labforward’s unique approach to laboratory data management has enabled our software solutions to compete globally, attracting researchers in industry and academia.

Reflecting on this year’s achievements, we looked at the progress in each of our departments from those who are developing our products to members from the HR and management team.

We are very excited and proud of what our team has achieved. This has been a very interesting year, with the highlight being the merger between Labfolder and Cubuslab into a brand-new company called Labforward! While each company has strong expertise in different areas of laboratory data management, together we can accelerate the rate of discoveries by closing the loop on how data is generated, managed and shared.

Simon Bungers, CEO and Co-Founder of Labforward

With the Labfolder ELN, we can see how more and more research organizations are embracing the digital approach to research data management. More importantly, they are sticking with it and never looking back. There is something about finding your research data in seconds that is just magical, especially when compared to the experience of retrieving information from paper notebooks.

Laboperator (previously known as Cubuslab) has gone through quite a transformation this year, from a small startup with a few pilot customers to a real innovation leader that convinced some of the biggest research organizations in the world to buy into nation- or worldwide roll-outs. It’s just so simple: connect your devices, build your workflows on the go, and press play. Let’s just say that lab automation is about to go mainstream!

Team

Team Members

Full-time employees

Software Engineers

Nationalities

Our company consists of many talented individuals driven to ensure that our customers receive the best possible experience. This year’s merger has led our team to grow, resulting in us having plenty of new faces in the main offices in Berlin and Karlsruhe, and some members who work remotely!

From the recruitment side, we value individuals who not only contribute their skills but also demonstrate a drive to achieve the company’s overall mission. Our aims are to create an inclusive and diverse team where everyone feels welcome, respected and appreciated.

To provide a welcoming environment and strengthen our company culture, we offer a number of team events:

Product & Engineering

2019 was an exciting year for the Product & Engineering department. We showcased our vision for the “Lab of the Future” at 2 trade fairs: Labvolution in Hannover along with BCEIA in Beijing. These exhibitions highlighted our newest product offer: Laboperator, the lab execution system for device management, lab IoT and smart workflows.

Laboperator

Releases

7449

commits

1440

files changed

120756

code insertions (+)

34336

code deletions (-)

In addition to pushing forward our vision of smart laboratory workflows, we focused on improving some of the core features of Laboperator: We implemented exports for jobs and measurements, gave you the power to track by whom and when a device was controlled via Laboperator and allow for dashboard customization using static content elements, adaptable grids, element titles and much more.

Labfolder

Releases

11115

commits

5471

files changed

334945

code insertions (+)

549712

code deletions (-)

For our Labfolder electronic lab notebook, the customers could see these improvements in form of a dedicated Exports page, which provides a more obvious journey and less confusion when looking for export files of your notebook entries or projects.

But we did not stop here, besides improving existing features we also introduced Signature Workflows, an app which streamlines the data validation process.

Marketing & Customer Success

926

Questions submitted

112

Hours (Average 1st Response Time)

Our dedicated Support Team, entirely composed of former scientists worked very hard this year to assist customers in their various questions. All efforts in this area are reflected on and can be directly measured by the customer satisfaction, which was excellent according to global standards. Besides this, much of the work done by our customer success and marketing team will have been very obvious to our users already, including the new layout of our websites.

Laboperator

In October, we wrote a press release announcing our company’s major rebranding. The rebranding process involved updating the visuals and design of the entire Laboperator website to better display our new company and brand identity!

Labfolder

We enlightened our ELN users with a new look for our comprehensive user guide as well as the migration of the Helpdesk to a new location, which allows us to place the Labfolder and Laboperator frequently asked questions together in one portal.

This year we also published a number of blog posts, articles and press releases to keep our customers informed about our product updates along with new technological developments in the laboratory. Here are some of our articles:

Science Labs of the Future: Perspectives and Predictions

5 ways a Laboratory Execution System will transform the laboratory environment

Future Scientists are not prepared for Smart Labs:

Going Smart: How IoT technologies and automation can revolutionise laboratory practice:

How Laboratory Digitization & Automation is Paving The Way For Research Integrity

Why I Chose to Intern at a Start-Up

How Cloud Computing is Changing the Laboratory Ecosystem

TOP 5 trends for lab digitization and automation in 2019

The Pros and Cons of having an ELN: What I’ve learned from my time in a wet lab

Internship Abroad : Interview in Berlin

Where we’re heading 2020:

Without giving away too many spoilers, here are a few things to look forward to in the coming year!

- - > In 2020 we will be launching a number of new features in our products, along with updating existing features to ensure that we’re meeting the specific requirements of researchers whether they work in neuroscience, agriculture or chemistry.

- > Over the next year, we will continue to generate relevant content to strengthen our customer’s knowledge about the benefits and opportunities of a fully functioning smart lab.

> We are always striving to improve our customer support system, to ensure that our customers always receive the best possible service.

Our vision is to create an entirely unified, flexible, innovative environment where scientists can safely store their research data. Digital technologies and software are at the forefront of laboratory evolution, they alter the way experiments are executed and how findings are recorded and analysed. This new layer of connectivity allows for more expedited, efficient research to be conducted. Labforward is a company which excels in creating software for the laboratory, in the next year we hope to continue our mission to strive towards a more connected laboratory.