Accelerating growth puts Horsham startup in company of national leaders
The Montgomery County firm sells a platform that lets pharmaceutical companies go paperless during drug trials. (Image courtesy of Clinical Ink)
Inc. Magazine is out with its annual ranking of the country’s 5,000 fastest-growing companies, and placing 57th is a startup based in Montgomery County.
Clinical Ink, with offices in Horsham, as well as North Carolina and Massachusetts, has seen revenue growth of more than 4,600 percent in the past three years. That’s good enough to qualify as the hottest private company in all of Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey.
The firm works with pharmaceutical companies, including big players such as Novartis and Otsuka, to go paperless during drug trials. Its tablet-based system and software provide real-time data, speeding up results and improving monitoring.
“The fortunate thing is, in 2015, our growth hasn’t slowed down. It has accelerated,” says CEO Ed Seguine. “So it is not just a flash in the pan. We are very much looking forward to continuing this growth streak.”
The company’s rapid expansion stems, in large part, from the FDA’s decision in 2013 to greenlight this type of software in drug trials. Clinical Ink recently leased more office space in Horsham, effectively tripling its size as it prepares to bring on 100 more employees.
Managing this type of growth does present its own unique challenges, Seguine said, including keeping customers and staff satisfied.
“Rapid growth is very, very dangerous. I’ve been doing this for a while, and I equate growing really rapidly to running the 400-meter hurdles,” he said. “You always have 10 hurdles around the track, but you have to jump over the one right in front of you first.”
And when you are growing at this pace, those hurdles, he said, come awfully fast.
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