through the development phase.”
Cellara, which currently has six employees, is trying to raise a Series A funding round. Fulton says he hopes to close the round by the end of the summer. Vodenlich says the target amount is in the range of $1 million to $2 million, though that is not set in stone.
Organizations that purchase Cellara’s software will likely be charged on a per-user, per-year basis, Vodenlich says. He adds that with most scientific businesses that operate under a software-as-a-service business model, that usually comes out to a few hundred dollars per user annually. Still, Vodenlich says his company is still “testing the numbers” when it comes to pricing.
Fulton says that CultureTrax loosely fits the description of a laboratory information management system (LIMS). Plenty of large lab supplies companies, such as Waltham, MA-based Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: [[ticker:TMO]]), sell LIMS software. And some companies provide software geared specifically toward stem cell labs, such as Steiner and Key Solutions.
Cellara currently has six customers, and its goal is for CultureTrax to be installed in 25 labs by the end of the year, Vodenlich says.
Fulton says that being headquartered in a city with a history of stem cell discoveries has been a major help.
“It’s nice being in Madison because there are a lot of people here who work in the stem cell field,” he says. “It would be really hard to do this company anywhere else.”
