Arne Smolders

Overview

Arne Smolders is the founder and CEO of AcademicLabs, a Ghent company that sells scientific intelligence to pharma, biotech and their suppliers. He completed a doctorate at Ghent University and started the company in 2015 after entering a business plan competition with colleagues, together with co-founder Jonas Anseeuw. The platform indexes research groups, researchers and companies through their publications, patents, grants, clinical trials and news, and is used to identify experts, map research landscapes and scout early-stage innovation. Its coverage is described as 150,000 research groups, 22 million researchers and 500,000 companies. In April 2022 Smolders said the team counted thirteen people, that 90 percent of customers came from outside Belgium, and that the company had raised more than 2 million euros, mainly from the Vlerick family. CMAST invested in 2017, and a capital increase of 0.79 million euros in 2023 offset an accumulated loss of 2.1 million euros. David Vlerick is a director. The company works from Korenmarkt 14b in Ghent with a team in the 11-50 range, including Francesco Ruospo as chief business officer and Hiroshi Yamazaki as VP business development for APAC.

Smolders did doctoral research at Ghent University and has said the work showed him how much time researchers lose looking for the right partners, expertise and equipment. He has described a tool he worked on that went unused for three years until a publication about it appeared, and calculated what that delay would mean across millions of researchers worldwide. With colleagues he entered a business plan competition for a platform on which companies could find research partners in seconds, and AcademicLabs started in 2015. The company won Battle for Talents in 2015 and passed through Start it @KBC, Telenet Kickstart and The Birdhouse before taking on investors, with CMAST investing in 2017. Smolders has been registered as a permanent representative on the board since 1 September 2017. Under his leadership the company signed a partnership with the EU-Japan Technology Transfer Helpdesk in 2019, with AGIO Capital & Business Solutions and Medicon Valley Alliance in June 2022, with MABA in June 2022, with the BioRN community in January 2023 and with Nucleate in July 2023.

As CEO, Arne oversees the commercial strategy and growth of AcademicLabs, working with academic institutions on research visibility and knowledge management.

Career history

1. FounderAcademicLabs