Belfast-based software company SciLeads is on target to more than double its workforce to 50 by the end of 2021 as it marks five years in business.
SciLeads, has developed a lead generation and market intelligence platform that helps scientific instrumentation suppliers across North America, Europe and Asia identify buyers for their products and has seen a huge increase in demand for its services amid the pandemic.
SciLeads, which started the year with 22 staff, now has 40 employees and has a further 10 vacancies to fill before the end of the year, including five software engineers. The vacancies also include a winter intake of their sales and marketing graduate programme, aimed at giving recent graduates the opportunity to begin their career in a fast-moving global company.
SciLeads’ marketing platform provides detailed data on all the research grant awards made globally and as the pandemic has continued this information has become even more valuable to those companies to help them reach their ideal customers – researchers who need high-tech scientific equipment, such as microscopes or genetic sequencers, to carry out their work.
Since SciLeads was launched in 2016 by three friends in their twenties – Daniel McRitchie, Laura Haldane and James Campbell – its turnover has almost doubled each year and the company is aiming to achieve similar growth this year.
While most of its staff are home-based in Northern Ireland, SciLeads has employees in locations from Belarus to Barcelona, and CEO Daniel McRitchie, originally from Belfast, has been based in Vancouver for the last three years.
Daniel said: “As a company which has always been remote first, we didn’t have to change any of our working practices when Covid hit.
“Unusually for the tech industry we employ more women than men and our culture has enabled us to employ people who live in different time zones or who don’t want to spend three hours of their days commuting to an office. This has worked well for some parents, who may choose to split their working day to pick their children up from school, or for some of our developers who prefer to work in the evenings.
“Although we may be widely dispersed geographically we’ve found effective ways to make sure we work as one team, from creating a virtual office where we can work collaboratively, to online speed networking events where staff get to know each other on a one to one basis, and in person team meet ups when restrictions allow.”
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