A look back at the company that has served thousands of life science customers with its focus on modern and simple software; then a glimpse into RURO’s future.

Frederick, MD

January 27, 2017 marks the 10th anniversary of the founding of RURO, Inc., a leading LIMS, and other sample management solutions provider.

•     RURO began in 2006 with targeted, off the shelf solutions to serve under-addressed, niche areas of science; offering FreezerPro, ezColony, and SciencyELN
•     Entering the LIMS market in 2010, RURO’s user interface, functionality, and responsiveness to customers earned it a loyal customer following
•     In recent years, RURO has tripled the size of its staff worldwide in the U.S., China, and Europe, expanded the scope of its software solutions and looks ahead to new areas of focus

Founded by software engineers, Vladimir Ledebev and Maxim Didenko, RURO’s small team was then able to create targeted, easy to adopt solutions for transgenic animal colony management with ezColony, electronic lab notebook with Sciency ELN and frozen sample management with FreezerPro, as customer needs were identified.

The most successful of these was FreezerPro, which today is installed in more than 1,000 laboratories across more than 45 countries, but each application was designed to give users something found nowhere else in the market. ezColony customers praised the system’s usability and affordability, especially when compared to ill-fitting or difficult to implement solutions. Sciency ELN is still unique in the Electronic Laboratory Notebook space for its unique blend of a paired down user interface and a modern, high performance backend; which situates it between the most advanced and expensive ELN’s that can be difficult to adopt, and budget offerings that can be difficult to use.

Through FreezerPro in particular, the original spirit of RURO continues, 10 years later, as RURO helps more than 40 labs per year upgrade from a flat Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to precisely crafted sample management software, in typically less than a week.

In 2010, RURO released its LIMS, now called Limfinity, which was originally designed to be a framework that could be configured to any laboratory’s set of requirements. Next Generation Sequencing laboratories particularly appreciated RURO’s LIMS’ ability to fit their specific prep and other workflows that varied from “out of the box” NGS LIMS software. But Limfinity provided the most value to the field of Translational Science when in 2014, together with the National Human Genome Research Institute, RURO created the world’s only end to end, clinical intake through diagnosis and treatment laboratory information management system for translational medicine. Today, Limfinity is RURO’s top offering, with a half dozen derived solutions that are quick to deploy, but not off the shelf – RURO found the balance leveraging the best of both an industry-based starting point and deep configurability available for when customers have unique methods and workflows. Limfinity’s Biobank solution is currently in use at top 3 and other big pharma organizations, while its Clinical Testing lab solution LimitLIS has RURO’s quickest growing user base. Finally, in a return to its original design, customers can now license a local copy or Cloud instance of the Limfinity framework itself, to design and implement their own LIMS with RURO’s help.

“Our team has grown a lot,” says Maxim Didenko, co-founder and CTO of RURO. “But what brings me the most joy is that software engineering is still pushing RURO. I want our solutions to be better and better every day, so does my team and, somehow, things work out with our QA department.”

In the past three and a half years, RURO grew from a team of roughly 15 based in Frederick, MD to now 45 across the U.S., and with satellite operations in China and Italy. Highlights in recent years have been RURO’s partnership with Thermo Australia (AUS) which recently expanded across the Asia Pacific (Thermo APAC), and accounts for more than half of all distributor sales worldwide. Another key in the company’s progression was RURO’s market leading RFID solutions which, beginning in 2011, established the first easy way for labs to gain the benefit of the technology for rapid and high volume check-in and check-out of entire boxes or racks of samples. In 2014, RURO used Limfinity to enable its RFID solutions to provide much larger scale laboratory facility automation such as intake, transfer and alert-based lab asset tracking. In 2015, RURO achieved third party ISO 9001 certification and also invested heavily into the Quality Assurance wing of its business. Now, 2017 has RURO focused on delivering more advanced biobank software and, perhaps most importantly, providing the modern LimitLIS, Laboratory Information System, as an alternative to the aging offerings for clinical laboratories in need of better software systems support.

“Our software is RURO’s heart,” says Vladimir Lebedev, co-founder and CEO of RURO. “I have trouble finding the words to express how much I care about these systems and, most of all, the customers who use and appreciate them. My deepest thanks to these amazing drivers, innovators and entrepreneurs for an amazing 10 years.”

For more information on LimitLIS, visit http://www.limitlis.cloud
For more information on FreezerPro, visit http://www.freezerpro.com
For more information on Limfinity, the software framework, visit http://www.limfinity.io
For more information on RURO; visit the newly enhanced http://www.RURO.com

About RURO, Inc.
Founded in 2006, RURO specializes in Laboratory Information Management Solutions. RURO’s Limfinity is the central data management solution in many of the world’s leading Translation Science programs and Biobanks. RURO is Laboratory Information Bliss.

Visit RURO at ruro.com for more information.