The CiteAb Story
CiteAb has grown from an academic project to an innovative data company that serves hundreds of thousands of researchers and many of the world's leading reagent suppliers and financial companies.
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CiteAb provides high quality data that accelerates scientific research by helping researchers identify and suppliers sell the best reagents.
CiteAb has grown from an academic project to an innovative data company that serves hundreds of thousands of researchers and many of the world's leading reagent suppliers and financial companies.
We started life in 2012 as a research project led by Dr Andrew Chalmers at the University of Bath, in partnership with technology company Storm. It’s aim was to provide a proven route to sourcing antibodies that actually work through the application of technology to identify those products that had been cited in the scientific literature.
After the research project concluded with huge success, with a rapidly growing user base of researchers, a move was made to spin the research out of the University in 2014 and create a commercial entity to better serve researchers and a fledgeling client base. CiteAb was born.
Over the following 18 months, CiteAb grew to become the world’s largest Antibody Search Engine, serving tens of thousands of researchers each month. A host of new data was added to provide more information about the antibodies and the experiments they were used for.
Alongside the meteoric rise in popularity seen by the Search Engine, CiteAb had by now developed a world leading data services arm by repurposing data that was used to power the search. This data proved so powerful, and of such high quality, that CiteAb’s client list rapidly grew.
As both the commercial and research client base continued to rapidly expand, CiteAb redoubled it’s efforts to focus on data quality. CiteAb responded to researcher and supplier feedback by starting to collect data on other reagent types, with the first update in 2018 including the addition of biochemicals, kits and proteins, and the next update in 2020 including experimental models.
Alongside a growing data portfolio, CiteAb expanded its product offering into published images in 2019. Manually cropping each image ensured maximum value for researchers and suppliers and maintained CiteAb’s high standards for quality. As well as images, the ability to create an account was added, enhancing the experiences of CiteAb’s users.
CiteAb will continue to focus on producing high quality data that provides insight to researchers, suppliers and financial organisations. Our data type coverage will continue to expand across reagent types, but also into fields such as instruments and software. We’ll remain focused on making our data as powerful and easy to use as possible for our researchers and commercial clients.
Having studied at the University of Bath’s School of Management, David has subsequently founded and grown a number of successful technology startups across the life science, finance, legal and compliance sectors.
Andy is a cell biologist who completed his PhD at the University of Bath. He carried out postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge, before returning to Bath to found his research group which focuses on cancerous epithelial cells.
Adam has sat as Chief Technical Officer for a number of fast growth technology companies over the past decade. A computer science graduate himself he commands a fantastic blend of management skill and practical ability.
Mark started his career as a software engineer, moving into sales and marketing roles, eventually pursuing a career in seed investments, co-founding Eden Ventures in 2003. As an alumnus of the University of Bath, Mark Farmer advises the Bath University Ventures board on IP commercialisation and so works very closely with CiteAb.