Chemical test software yields profits for R.I. firm

Ion Signature Technology has received Slater seed funding

Every chemical has a fingerprint – from the flavor in your soft drink, to drugs in an addict’s bloodstream. And Ion Signature Technology’s software, the company says, cannot only trace those fingerprints, but it can do it faster than anyone else ever has.

Formed in 1996 by Tufts University chemist Albert Robbat Jr., Ion started out in Cambridge, Mass., and did research and development for several years. In October 2004, Rhode Island’s Slater Technology Fund provided $75,000 to help the company move to the next level.

Ion relocated to North Smithfield, and in January 2005, it launched its first product, IST for GC/MS, mass spectrometry software designed for high-volume testing labs in the areas of environmental science, forensics, petrochemicals and chemicals.

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The company has also developed several add-ons to the software to facilitate analysis, graphing and presentations.

Since the product was launched, Ion President and CEO John C. Moore said, sales have grown steadily, and the software has been applied to a wide range of uses.

Food and beverage clients may use the software to analyze the compounds of an artificially flavored banana iced tea, Moore noted. Forensic scientists may use Ion’s product to examine compounds in the corpse of a person who died from a drug overdose. Environmental agencies can use it to examine soil.

In a valuable endorsement, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has said the software “reduces the need for re-analysis and dilution, and increases confidence in surrogate, internal standard and target compound identification and quantification.”
In other words: Ion’s method gets the results right in the first place and with easier, less time-consuming procedures.

In fact, Moore said, Ion’s software cuts back on analysis time from 40 minutes per sample, to five minutes. The system’s accuracy eliminates the need for re-analysis and cuts data review time in half, he added. And because Ion’s software can analyze compounds at two levels of magnitude beyond what was previously possible, it can identify compounds that were previously missed in different analyses, Moore said.

Ion wouldn’t disclose sales figures for its software, but the results have been encouraging enough that last October, the Slater Fund invested another $75,000 in the company, and the Cherrystone Angel Group provided $310,000 in capital.

“Re-investing in [Ion’s] seed round was an easy decision for us,” Slater Managing Director Ronald Unterman said in a news release at the time. “Their technology provides a clear benefit for customers, and now that the marketplace is realizing that, we wanted to make sure that the company was funded to expand here in Rhode Island.”

The capital invested by the two firms was primarily used to boost sales and marketing efforts, a move that Moore said has begun to pay off.

Moore, who spent last week at sales-effectiveness training seminars outside of Rhode Island, said sales have steadily grown in the last year. The company recently signed its first distribution agreement in Japan, and Moore said he expects to announce other deals in the next 30 to 45 days, with instrument suppliers.

Also this month, the company introduced Ion Signature FileConvert, an application that makes the files of different manufacturers compatible with the Ion software.

The application will allow for more access to the program and more flexibility, Moore said.
“Our goal is to really become the gold standard in the mass spectrometry field,” he said.

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