NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – In an effort to focus on the development of new products for evolving research areas, RainDance Technologies has restructured, including a headcount reduction of about 10 percent, GenomeWeb has learned.
According to Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer Darren Link, who spoke with GenomeWeb this week on the sidelines of the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference in Orlando, Florida, RainDance had grown fast in early 2015 in anticipation of an initial public offering that year. After it withdrew its IPO due to changed market conditions, that headcount was no longer sustainable. "We were larger than we needed to be on the commercial side, for a company that did not do an IPO," Link told GenomeWeb.
RainDance, which is based in Billerica, Massachusetts, filed a preliminary prospectus for an IPO last March, seeking to raise $60 million. In August, it decided not to proceed with the offering due to unfavorable market conditions.
The company recently decided to focus on the development of new products for single-cell analysis and for linking short DNA reads into long reads for phasing. It also decided to scale back its headcount from a peak of 115 employees to about 100 staff members.
While the changes occurred throughout the organization, the staff reductions primarily affected the commercial side, Link said. Going forward, RainDance will rely increasingly on distributors in regions outside the US, which it has already done in Asia and will now also do in Europe.
Current customers will not be affected, as there were no changes to the field applications and engineering teams. The company also continues to update existing products, most recently by launching new software for digital PCR data analysis at the end of last year. And while RainDance does not plan to grow its R&D staff in the near term, it may do so in the second half of this year. Link said the company continues to watch the market for the right time to possibly revive its IPO.
RainDance sells several products, including the RainDrop digital PCR system and the ThunderStorm and ThunderBolts systems for next-generation sequencing target enrichment. Link said the company has seen growth in consumables volumes for digital PCR over the past year and has placed products in about 20 cancer centers over the last two years.