Next Generation Sequencing

With a plan of revolutionizing the software for genetics and genomics, CLC bio was founded by brothers Bjarne and Thomas Knudsen on January 4th 2005. We first started out with a free program - what is today known as CLC Sequence Viewer - which was launched in the Summer of ‘05. Later that year we launched our first commercial product and soon after more followed. All along we found ourselves having considerable success with our formula of delivering advanced bioinformatics algorithms wrapped in a user-friendly graphical user-interface.

Right from the start we had a global mindset, wanting all scientists working with bioinformatics and molecular biology to have our applications installed on their computers. We focused heavily on driving potential users to download our software directly from our website and had considerable success in doing that. One year after the first release we reached 100 000 downloads, 400 000 two years later and in 2008 we crossed the magic barrier of 1 million downloads.

But it wasn’t just good decisions all the way

Our venture in to FPGA technology with our Bioinformatics Cube was very interesting and we made some nice implementations of known algorithms, but basically two things weren’t as we originally expected. The market was smaller than anticipated and we were simply too good accelerating the same algorithms with SIMD technology on existing computer hardware. That in essence has taken over for most of our FPGA development. But the Cube surely works well in itself and looks nice - and people still talk about it when we’re at conferences and exhibitions, so something apparently was done right.

Some marketing guy *cough* also bought heaps of nicely designed cardboard boxes for the software, in anticipation that people would like to have their avant-garde software shipped physically after purchase. How wrong! All the boxes, minus a couple, are still in the basement and would at some point make a very nice bonfire in the parking lot…

Oh, and there was the very first board meeting which was in crisis mode, shortly after starting the company: The company was named “Geniematics” back then, but an American company who had a product with a similar name kindly sent a letter asking us to use another name for our company. A couple of months in naming despair ensued before settling on the acronym “CLC bio” which to this day remains a secret. Contrary to popular belief it’s not “cake loving company” although we do like cake. A lot.

Recent years

In 2007 we changed strategy, focusing primarily on Next Generation Sequencing data analysis. That was probably the single most important decision in the company’s history and has lead to the market position we have today, with some very ample solutions for analyzing high-throughput sequencing data from all the major NGS platforms. A fact also stressed when our enterprise platform, CLC Genomics Server, won the Best of Show award at the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in 2009.

Here five years later, after revealing some very positive fiscal numbers from 2009 last week, we can honestly say that the future has never looked brighter for CLC bio!