Missoula’s Prime Labs raises $600,000 in private investment
Prime Labs landed an investment from Utah-based health care company A Step Forward last month. Founded in 2018, Prime Labs develops software for mass spectrometry. Photo via Rob Smith.
By Martina Pansze
Missoula-based Prime Labs is a scientific software company that develops tools for mass spectrometry, a subfield of chemistry and biochemistry used to reveal the molecular composition of samples.
Prime Labs has created Prometheus, the first cloud-based software for mass spectrometry data processing. The program offers custom interfaces for customers in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries.
Last month, Utah-based home health care company A Step Forward invested $600,000 in Prime Labs to fund continued development and the forthcoming launch of Prometheus.
CEO Rob Smith founded the company in 2018 while working as a Computer Science professor at the University of Montana.
After its founding, Prime Labs was named on the Montana High Tech Business Alliance’s 2019 Startups to Watch List. Since then the employee-owned company has grown to seven team members, all of which are former students of Smith’s at UM.
Prime Labs participated in C2M Beta, Blackfoot Communications’ accelerator program, in 2019. The company has also secured two Phase I and one Phase II NSF/SBIR program grants, as well as several grants from the state of Montana for their technology research and development.
About the Publisher: Launched in 2014, the Montana High Tech Business Alliance is an nonpartisan nonprofit association of highly-engaged high tech and manufacturing companies and affiliates creating high-paying jobs in Montana. For more information, visit MTHighTech.org or subscribe to our biweekly newsletter.
About the Author: Martina Pansze is the Communications Director for the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. She graduated from Whitman College with a degree in Film and Media Studies.