SciLeads set to more than double its staff

Belfast based software company SciLeads is on target to more than double its workforce to 50 by the end of 2021 as it marks five years in business.

The company has developed a lead generation and market intelligence platform that helps scientific instrumentation suppliers across North America, Europe and Asia identify buyers for their products and has seen a huge increase in demand for its services amid the pandemic.

SciLeads, which started the year with 22 staff, now has 40 employees. It has a further 10 vacancies to fill before the end of the year, including five software engineers.

The vacancies also include a winter intake of their sales and marketing graduate programme, aimed at giving recent graduates the opportunity to begin their career in a fast-moving global company.

The company’s marketing platform provides detailed data on all the research grant awards made globally and as the pandemic has continued this information has become even more valuable to those companies to help them reach their ideal customers – researchers who need high-tech scientific equipment, such as microscopes or genetic sequencers, to carry out their work.

Since SciLeads was launched in 2016 by three friends in their twenties, Daniel McRitchie, Laura Haldane and James Campbell, its turnover has almost doubled each year and the company is aiming to achieve similar growth this year.

Its software is used by eight of the top 10 global companies in the life science instrumentation field including Bio-Rad, which provides a wide range of products to scientists to support Covid-19 screening and research.

Exciting time for SciLeads

Daniel McRitchie, CEO, said: “It’s an exciting time for SciLeads as we mark five years in business and look ahead to the next stage of growing our global business, starting by doubling our workforce to 50 by this year and launching a new Salesforce app to streamline our service for clients.

“We have seen additional growth as a result of the cancellation of industry events where suppliers usually network with researchers because it meant that many scientific instrumentation companies were in a crisis and had to look at marketing to prospective buyers in new ways.

“While innovation and exceptional data quality were the main drivers of Scileads’ success before Covid, the need for companies to experiment and try new digital marketing tools has further boosted sales in the last 18 months.

“We also have the largest Covid-19 lead database in the world enabling access to almost 70,000 research leads in over 100 countries. For Covid-19 research alone we track $40bn worth of funding from over 2,800 funding sources in 100 countries. Our software provides valuable insights into research activities including diagnostic, vaccine and drug development, epidemiology and public health.”

While most of its staff are home-based in Northern Ireland, SciLeads has employees in locations from Belarus to Barcelona, and Daniel, originally from Belfast, has been based in Vancouver for the last three years.

Mr McRitchie added: “As company which has always been remote first, we didn’t have to change any of our working practices when Covid hit.

“Unusually for the tech industry we employ more women than men and our culture has enabled us to employ people who live in different time zones or who don’t want to spend three hours of their days commuting to an office.”

“This has worked well for some parents, who may choose to split their working day to pick their children up from school, or for some of our developers who prefer to work in the evenings.

“Although we may be widely dispersed geographically we’ve found effective ways to make sure we work as one team, from creating a virtual office where we can work collaboratively, to online speed networking events where staff get to know each other on a one to one basis, and in person team meet ups when restrictions allow.”

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