Life Sciences consultancy NovusLife growing rapidly
NovusLife, a Boston-based biotech and life sciences consultancy firm has grown rapidly on the back of a booming biotech industry.
In recent decades, life science and its impact on human wellbeing have created a booming industry, with discoveries, applications and spinoffs in health, agriculture, medicine, the pharmaceutical and food science industries. Taking part in the boom is NovusLife, a young consultancy start-up which has tripled in size since its founding just eight months ago.
The company, with its offices in Waltham, Boston, started with six employees. It has since grown to employ 20 consultants, employing 16 directly while engaging four subcontractors. NovusLife advises its clients in biotech, pharmaceutical and medical device companies about project-based work, without their need to hire additional permanent employees. The company projects a revenue of $3 million next year on the basis of its rapid growth. The solid growth has meant it is expanding into the European market. It has hired Frederic Liegeois, based in Paris, to oversee its business affairs on the continent.
The rapid growth exceeding the anticipations of founder and CEO Andrew Young. "We thought this year was going to be to establish the company," he said. "We are in full swing." Young notes however that the rapid growth of the company is the result of a move by the biotech industry toward a consultancy based model. "I think outsourcing in general has been happening more and more in the last year and a half," he says. "A lot of people are becoming believers in this model."
Andrew Young was inspired by his late father, an MIT trained nutritional biochemist, Vernon Young, to start up NovusLife. Andrew Young has worked for and founded a string of life science companies. He was a manager at Darwin Partners, a consulting firm for technology firms, in the 1990s, which “rode the wave of the early tech boom,” before being sold. He co-founded BioForce Solutions, in 2000, however, he said “he wasn’t totally happy there” and left in 2004. Before founding NovusLife he started BioBridges in 2005, which was a consultancy as well as a contract staffing firm, which he left at the end of last year.
