What led to the creation of SciY, and what drove the collaboration of various companies under the SciY umbrella?
The creation of SciY stems from our understanding that our focus industries, such as biopharma, chemistry and related industries, are ripe for automation in a whole set of stages of the value chain, and that this automation starts from and will be built on digitalization. The idea was to create a hub that offers customers a comprehensive range of scientific software solutions. Different platforms came together under the SciY umbrella with a shared vision to combine their expertise and activities to create a vendor-agnostic software brand. SciY aims to provide end-to-end solutions for the entire life sciences value chain by developing innovative and modular software suites tailored to the specific needs of diverse customers. Our decision to collaborate was motivated by a commitment to data stewardship, maximizing data value, supporting digitalization, and ultimately, helping customers drive automation.
How does SciY define its mission?
Our mission is to empower the life sciences to accelerate innovation, time to market and commercialization, through disruptive automation and digitalization. At SciY, we believe that every piece of scientific data matters. We ensure effective data storage, management, and value extraction for our customers.
This is where the different businesses that comprise SciY come into play. ZONTAL and LOGS provide high-quality annotation, making the data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and AI ready, along with in-depth processing and analysis by Mestrelab. Our commitment extends to chemistry, biochemistry, and biology, impacting research, development, and manufacturing decisions.
Partnering with companies like Optimal Industrial Technologies and Optimal Industrial Automation, we are driven to automate processes and accelerate progress. We also count Arxspan among our businesses, a fully integrated cloud platform for scientific data management, which is designed to drastically improve collaborative research.
Could you elaborate on the synergies that SciY aims to create among its businesses? How does this facilitate collaboration and innovation for customers?
Seamless integration between different software and hardware is critical for many customers as it is often impossible to source equipment or data analysis solutions from a single company. SciY creates synergies between businesses by developing the necessary bridges between individual components to create an all-encompassing workflow. From this perspective, we have over 600 integrations with different hardware and software solutions, a number which is continuously growing on a demand-led basis.
The advantage for customers is that they can now benefit from a single integrated platform, simplifying purchasing, training, and use and receiving customer support from a single source. As well as making it possible to use data for process or quality control in new ways and create new methods of automation, the synergic platforms also help reduce complexity. This frees up time for customers to better focus on their own R&D, sales, or other activities, rather than the cumbersome approach of managing complex and disparate software and hardware.
SciY helps achieve this with its highly multidisciplinary team, which can support customers in finding the right, bespoke solution. SciY has a 24/7 customer support structure and the breadth of expertise to understand the challenges customers face, no matter whether their industry is life science or chemistry.
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What role does SciY envision playing in the broader industry landscape?
Automation is a core part of the development of Industry 4.0, but to achieve automation in the research laboratory or manufacturing plant, you need highly advanced design and feedback systems.
The feedback system should include a sensor or measurement tool that verifies if a product adheres to standards and if environmental conditions are properly maintained. Additionally, it should feature a feedback control system that can adjust experimental conditions or manufacturing processes to evaluate their impact on the outcome.
Finally, once the diagnostic measurements have been made, a data analysis process needs to be conducted to evaluate the relationship between the changes the feedback system has made and the new outcomes to optimize the process.
Maximizing the potential of scientific data generated by instrumentation can significantly enhance customer automation and productivity. However, fully leveraging this data is not straightforward. It involves integrating data from multiple instruments, sensors and software environments and developing automated routines for experiment design and data analysis. These steps are essential for transforming raw data into actionable insights that drive efficiency and innovation.
Our role will be connecting the physical sensors in the whole value chain, from Research to Manufacturing and QC, to the enterprise software that drives our customers’ business, helping them improve their productivity and quality and get products to market faster. We will also strive to collect all data generated in the process, annotate, preserve and prepare it so it may be usable by AI, data analytics, visualization and other process optimization efforts. By doing so, we will achieve full digitalization and automation of our customers’ workflows.
About the Speaker
Santi is President of SciY. He is an experienced entrepreneur specializing in creating and building technology companies, developing shareholder value with strategic exits or other liquidity events as the ultimate objective.
He is passionate about impacting the world around him by building companies that make a material difference to the wealth of shareholders, communities, and our environment.
About “SciY” 
SciY is a software brand that provides a broad spectrum of scientific software solutions across the entire life sciences spectrum. SciY is a concept developed by Bruker BioSpin which emerged from collaborative efforts with various brand-neutral software partners, including Mestrelab, Arxspan, Optimal Industrial Technologies, Optimal Industrial Automation, and ZONTAL.
Fuelled by a shared progressive entrepreneurial vision and the necessity to recognize the benefits and added value of a unified market presence and a diversified brand portfolio, these partners united their individual ventures under one collective brand – SciY, housed within the newly established Integrated Data Solutions Division of the Bruker BioSpin Group.
SciY consolidates all current vendor-agnostic software platform and solution brands, and will encompass future innovations born from this collaborative synergy. A key motivation for SciY is to forge new and innovative, modular software solution platforms, meticulously tailored to meet the specific needs of their target markets and applications, and to facilitate digitalization and automation efforts in the lab.
