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LIMS Unpacked (2 of 4): The Founders

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A grad student. A garage tinkerer. A DuPont scientist. An MIT dropout. Some of the people behind this nearly invisible software.

LIMS isn't the kind of software that gets Netflix documentaries. But the people who built this industry? Their stories are better than you'd expect. Below are four examples to show you just how interesting the origins of LIMS are. 

 

🎓  The Grad Student → The Industry's Oldest Major Survivor

Mark Chudzicki founded one of the very first LIMS company in 1981 — while still a grad student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He called it Laboratory MicroSystems, needed a $100,000 loan from New York state to get it going, and ran it out of a refurbished hotel with 15 employees [1].

By 1987, sales had grown 532% — earning a spot on the Inc. 500 list. Large US clients included General Electric, DuPont, Dow Corning, Monsanto, and Exxon. He sold the company in 1990 for $2.42 million. It eventually became LabVantage — now among the world's biggest LIMS providers [2].

The point: one of the oldest still-operating LIMS companies was started in a hotel room by a grad student with a government loan.

 

💡 Fun fact:

During COVID, the U.S. military chose LabVantage for vaccine production at Walter Reed (a military medical centre in Maryland, USA) [3]. Not bad for a company that started in a hotel.

 

🏠 The Garage Tinkerer → $200 Billion Empire

George Hatsopoulos emigrated from Greece to the US to study at MIT, including completing a PhD [4]. He founded Thermo Electron in 1956, which was initially based in a garage. His original product? Instruments that converted heat into electricity [5].

Over decades, through hundreds of acquisitions, that garage startup became Thermo Fisher Scientific — now worth over $200 billion [6] with around 125,000 employees [7]. Their LIMS product (SampleManager) came via acquiring companies along the way.

The wildest acquisition story: in 2006, a $10.6 billion merger was nearly blocked by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission because of a $17 million evaporator business [8]. That's like a house sale being delayed over who keeps the toaster.

 

💡 Fun fact:

Thermo Fisher has made so many acquisitions that they've spent over $70 billion buying dozens of companies since 2006 [9] [10]. SampleManager LIMS's parent company is just one piece of the enormous puzzle.

 

🧪 The DuPont Scientist → World's Most Widely Deployed LIMS

Vance Kershner was a scientist at DuPont in the 1980s. He saw how labs struggled with data management, and realised he could build something better [11].

In 1987, he founded LabWare in Wilmington, Delaware. Today it's the most widely deployed LIMS on the planet — running in over 29,000 laboratories across 125 countries [12]. It's used by 21 of the top 25 pharma companies [13].

Here's the unusual part: LabWare has never been sold. Never been listed on the stock market. And Kershner? Still running it.

He didn't just build a product. He built the standard.

 

💡 Fun fact:

LabWare is built in Smalltalk — a programming language from 1972 that most developers today have never touched. It's like discovering the world's most-used lab software runs on a vintage engine.

 

💻 The MIT Dropout → $6 Billion at Age 30

Sajith Wickramasekara was a computer science student at MIT when he noticed something absurd: scientists in biology labs were spending quite a lot of time on manual data entry instead of actual science.

In 2012, he dropped out to co-found Benchling with his classmate Ashu Singhal.  Raising money was brutal — software investors thought it was "small and unimportant," while science investors "didn't understand software; they invested in drugs." [14].  

By 2021, Benchling was in the hands of over 200,000 researchers [15] and worth $6.1 billion [16].

Today, Moderna — a pioneer of mRNA vaccines — uses Benchling in its R&D operations [17].

 

💡 Fun fact:

Benchling went through Y Combinator [15] — the same accelerator as Airbnb and Stripe. Unusual for lab software.

 

Do you want to digitally transform your lab? Have a look at our services page to read more about the professional services we offer.

 

Sources

[1] The New York Times. State Leads in Replacing U.S. Economic Aid (1986). https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/07/us/state-leads-in-replacing-us-economic-aid.html

[2] Wikipedia. LabVantage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVantage

[3] BioPharm International. LabVantage Awarded U.S. Army Contract for LIMS COVID-19 Vaccine Support. https://www.biopharminternational.com/view/labvantage-awarded-us-army-contract-for-lims-covid-19-vaccine-support

[4] MIT News. George Hatsopoulos, Thermo Electron Founder, Dies at 91. https://news.mit.edu/2018/george-hatsopoulos-senior-lecturer-emeritus-mechanical-engineering-thermo-electron-founder-dies-0921

[5] Company-Histories.com. Thermo Electron Corporation Company History. https://www.company-histories.com/Thermo-Electron-Corporation-Company-History.html

[6] Stock Analysis. Thermo Fisher Scientific Market Capitalization (TMO). https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/tmo/market-cap/

[7] Thermo Fisher Scientific. CSR Data Summary. https://corporate.thermofisher.com/csr/csr-report/data-summary

[8] Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN). Thermo Fisher Scientific. https://cen.acs.org/articles/84/i48/Thermo-Fisher-Scientific.html

[9] BioProcess International. Thermo Fisher Eyes Up to $50bn in M&A in Coming Years. https://www.bioprocessintl.com/deal-making/thermo-fisher-eyes-up-to-50bn-m-a-in-coming-years

[10] Thermo Fisher Scientific Investor Relations. Thermo Fisher Scientific Completes Acquisition of Clario Holdings, Inc. https://ir.thermofisher.com/investors/news-events/news/news-details/2026/Thermo-Fisher-Scientific-Completes-Acquisition-of-Clario-Holdings-Inc-/default.aspx

[11] Delaware Bio. LabWare CEO Kershner Celebrated with Freedom Award. https://www.delawarebio.org/news/652764/LabWare-CEO-Kershner-celebrated-with-Freedom-Award-.htm

[12] LabWare. About LabWare. https://www.labware.com/about

[13] LabWare. Pharmaceutical Industry. https://www.labware.com/industries/pharmaceutical

[14] TechCrunch. Why You Must Build a Moat Around Early Customers, According to Benchling's CEO and Co-Founder. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/25/why-you-must-build-a-moat-around-early-customers-according-to-benchlings-ceo-and-co-founder/

[15] Forbes. He Left MIT at 22 to Solve a Problem Investors Didn't Get. Now His Company Is Worth $6 Billion. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenli1/2022/03/21/he-left-mit-at-22-to-solve-a-problem-investors-didnt-get-now-his-company-is-worth-6-billion/

[16] Pharmaceutical Technology. Benchling Raises $100 Million in Funding and Continues European Expansion. https://www.pharmtech.com/view/benchling-raises-100-million-in-funding-and-continues-european-expansion

[17] Benchling. Moderna: Building AI-Driven Research and Technical Development for Tomorrow. https://www.benchling.com/customer-stories/moderna-building-ai-driven-research-and-technical-development-for-tomorrow

 

 

Next up: How did all this software perform when the pandemic hit? →