Clustermarket: Leveraging the power of collaboration
Clustermarket, founded in 2015 by three university students Niklas Friedberg, Tobias Wingbermuehle and Johannes Solzbach in London, United Kingdom, has been a great success story. The high cost of research equipment and services has traditionally always been a barrier for the commercialisation of research and innovation in science. The idea was to build a world-leading online sharing platform for life science researchers with the goal to democratise access to expensive laboratory equipment and services. With Clustermarket’s aim to enable life science innovators to take their ideas to market faster and cheaper they, in 2018 decided to provide scientists with a tool that would not only enable collaboration and transparency between research institutions, but also help them manage all activities within their lab. Thus another set of features under the brand name Bookkit was launched while Clustermarket continued to grow exponentially, reaching over 6,000 registered labs on the platform (April 2021). While many labs were using pen and paper to manage their equipment related activities, Bookkit introduced an elegant solution that has already proven its worth during 2019-2020 as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, Bookkit is being used globally at some of the most respected research institutions and scientific companies. Now, Clustermarket aims to become the end-to-end equipment management platform – the laboratory operating system for the lab of the future, connecting with other digital lab solutions such as ELNs and IoT solutions.
