Clustermarket, founded in 2015 by Niklas Friedberg, Tobias Wingbermühle and Johannes Solzbach in London, is an online marketplace helping scientists, engineers and other technology pioneers access lab equipment in nearby institutions. The high cost of research equipment and services has traditionally always been a high barrier for the commercialization of research and innovation in science, therefore the idea was to build a world-leading online sharing platform for life science researchers with the goal to democratize access to expensive laboratory equipment and services. Clustermarket is aiming to enable life science innovators to take their ideas to market faster and cheaper. In 2018, Clustermarket launched a lab booking system for academic research facilities and industrial laboratories that want to manage their lab infrastructure in the most efficient way. Today, the Clustermarket lab booking system (formerly known as Bookkit) is being used in countries around the world at some of the best research institutions and science companies such as Harvard University, Stanford University, MIT, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Illumina, Cytiva and many others.
Many labs contain a wide range of expensive instruments which are often in high demand, resulting in bottlenecks while researchers wait for access to a piece of equipment essential to the next stage of their experiment. Clustermarket’s booking system can manage the booking of these instruments which helps significantly reduce waiting time, enabling researchers to check availability and schedule experiments more efficiently. This enables lab managers to save their valuable time and reduces the admin workload. It also reduces the dead time of an instrument, identifying under-utilized resources which can then be opened up for use by other departments or even institutions thus unlocking the real value of the state-of-the-art technology.
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