Auckland, New Zealand-based Biomatters announced this week that it has opened its first US offices in San Francisco, CA and Newark, NJ.
Biomatters' new offices will provide customer support to its North American clients including onsite training as well as custom installation support options and development.
Currently, the company's US-based offices have a total of four employees. Its operations in Newark will be led by East Coast sales director Luke Brennan, who will head up a team of three; while the San Francisco office is being managed West Coast sales director Kashef Qaadri.
Prior to joining Biomatters, Brennan worked at Genomatix where he was director of its Eastern US sales. Qaadri joined Biomatters from IO Informatics where he was director of business development. At present the company isn't hiring additional staff for its new offices, Peter Meintjes, the company's market development manager, told BioInform.
The new offices were opened in response to growing demand for its Geneious Pro and Geneious Server software products from US-based clients, which include commercial, government, and academic research institutions, Biomatters said.
These customers include groups such as the US National Institutes of Health, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Smithsonian Institution, and the US Department of Agriculture.
The company also has partnerships with several US-based companies. In June, it signed a deal with genomic services firm Genewiz to jointly develop an analysis solution that would streamline DNA-based services from ordering through to data analysis (BI 6/3/2011).
Biomatters is also working with ActiveMotif's TimeLogic to allow users of its Geneious Server software to run bioinformatics jobs on Time Logic's accelerated DeCypher system, a field programmable gate array-based technology (BI 1/14/2011). Additionally, the company was tapped to join the Pacific Biosciences partner program earlier this year.
Currently, Biomatters is holding its own against offerings from competing firms like CLC Bio as well as more established technologies such as DNAStar's LaserGene and Life Technologies' Vector NTI, Meintjes said.
For example, he said that the company's internal metrics indicate that its software is cited between 2 and 2.5 times more often than CLC Bio's products in peer-reviewed journals.
Additionally, the privately held company reports that it saw 297 percent year-over-year growth in its last fiscal year.
Moving forward, the company plans to build an online applications store as well as to release a plug-in for its Geneious software. Meintjes declined to provide specific details on the planned releases but he did say that Biomatters plans to release the first two apps later this year.