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Chuck Donnelly, CEO and co-founder of RockStep Solutions
August 30, 2022
Portland tech startup raises $5.3M for product development, expansion
RockStep Solutions, a Portland-based software developer for the life sciences industry, recently closed a $5.3 million funding round to finance further growth.
Details on investors who participated in the Series A equity financing round were not immediately available.
The move comes a little more than a year after the company raised $2 million in July 2021, when the company had 13 staff members on the payroll.
Today, the company employs 23 people in Portland, with plans to add 20 more positions in the next 12 months. RockStep has an international reach, doing business in 14 U.S. states, Canada, and Europe.
RockStep Solutions was founded in 2015 after receiving a Small Business Innovation Research award from the National Institutes of Health and a development loan from the Maine Technology Institute.
On Monday, the company said it will use the $5.3 million in new financing to invest in product development, market expansion and continued workforce growth. RockStep, located at 48 Free St., underscored its commitment to create new jobs in Maine.
“Closing our Series A round ensures RockStep retains its global leadership position while growing our workforce in Maine," said the company's CEO and co-founder, Chuck Donnelly. "We continue to be grateful to our early investors, including [Maine Technology Institute], who helped us get to this point.”
Before launching RockStep, Donnelly was the director of computational sciences at the Jackson Laboratory, based in Bar Harbor.
Fellow co-founder Julie Morrison, who serves as the company's president, previously developed laboratory procedures called assays for detecting microorganisms at Westbrook-based IDEXX Laboratories Inc. (Nasdaq: IDXX) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
RockStep's flagship product, called Climb, is a cloud-based software platform for managing in vivo research and operations for biomedical research, including drug discovery.
With Climb, RockStep aims to provide a scalable, complete solution that addresses the entire spectrum of pre-clinical in vivo drug discovery challenges in one integrated package.
Noting that Climb is a market leader for in vivo research, Morrison said the company is currently working on global deployments with tier-one pharmaceutical companies.
The new financing "allows us to expand our functionality to move into new drug development markets," she said.
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