Intelligent Pharma opens fifth international office in Munich

Catalan firm Intelligent Pharma, which provides computational chemistry services for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, has opened new offices in Munich (Germany) to expand its market share in the area, where its presence is still limited. This is the fifth office it has inaugurated in the past five years. The company is also present in Germany, the United Kingdom, Cambridge and Canada. All of their offices, including the new one in Munich, are working to develop a sales platform to boost activity in these areas.

“In the United Kingdom we saw a significant increase when we opened our offices there and I’m sure it’s because clients like working with someone nearby,” says Ignasi Belda, founder and CEO of Intelligent Pharma. The only office that is not purely focused on sales is the one in Canada, which the company opened last February in Calgary, Alberta, for petrochemical research.

Ignasi Belda explains that Germany has a very powerful pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, and that Bavaria is of particular interest. “We have some clients but, given our potential, we could have more. Currently we are the only service provider in computational chemistry with a presence in five countries and customers in twenty countries around the world,” says Belda.

The company’s CEO believes the computational chemistry market “is still untapped”. There are companies, like Nimbus Discovery, that are working in the pharmaceutical sector and base their research on computational chemistry. Others provide computational chemistry services without a research line, to help companies accelerate innovation in their products. This is what Intelligent Pharma does. “We have competition but it’s not likely that we’ll be fighting for the same clients,” says Belda.

The niche Intelligent Pharma has carved out in the market can be seen in its growth. The company was founded nearly nine years ago, and has been turning a profit for the past six. In the past year alone, the company saw turnover grow 50% from the previous year. “We’re growing at a great pace, much faster than we expected. Now that we’re pulling out of the crisis, we’re overwhelmed,” says Ignasi Belda. The company has taken on 25% more staff this year and now has roughly 25 employees in total between the headquarters and other offices.

Intelligent Pharma has also just received an injection of public capital, €550,000 through the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism Plan Avanza 2. These funds will allow the company to continue developing its virtual poly-pharmacology technology, Pythia, to discover new mechanisms of action for molecules with therapeutic potential and to incorporate functions in high demand, like phenotype data and metabolic pathways.