Text and photo: Nelly Sander, AAU Communication and Public Affairs

Kenneth Kastaniegaard was in Dublin when he had an epiphany. As a PhD student at AAU, he attended a conference on research into human proteins, and a speaker made a comment that made him think.

"There was a keynote speaker said rather bluntly that researchers were wasting their time by constantly running new experiments when so much data was already available from researchers who had done the same experiments," says Kenneth Kastaniegaard, who is now CEO and co-founder of Biogenity.

The remark set things in motion. Kenneth Kastaniegaard immediately began to think about how existing research data could be better utilised. That idea later became the basis for the company.

From diseases to ants and trees

Today, Biogenity helps researchers, hospitals, biotech and pharmaceutical companies find patterns and correlations in biological data. Using bioinformatics, statistics and machine learning, the company turns large volumes of data into insights that can be used to test hypotheses and advance research. 

The assignments vary widely. This could be research into diseases such as multiple sclerosis or inflammatory bowel disease, where researchers want to understand the differences between people with and without the disease. But it can also be about how the biology of ants is affected by living alongside wasps, or why certain trees perform better than others under the same growing conditions.

"It's one of the things that makes our work exciting. We hear an incredible amount about what is going on in the world of research, including things we would never normally imagine anyone was actually studying," says Kenneth Kastaniegaard.

From beers to business

While the conference in Dublin was still in full swing, Kenneth Kastaniegaard found a link to the presentation and formulated a pitch. The point was simple: With so much research data already available, it ought to be put to much better use.

"I wrote a long message explaining that I could easily collect this kind of data and set up analyses that would automatically generate results from it,” he says.

He sent the message to a few people in his network, including Louis Loeb, who later became his co-founder.

Kenneth Kastaniegaard and Louis Loeb had met at a student hall party. And over a beer or two, they had on several occasions exchanged more or less serious ideas about starting a business together. For example, they had considered a company that would provide drone photography for social events.

But the Dublin idea had more potential.

Working evenings alongside their studies

While Kenneth Kastaniegaard completed his PhD and Louis Loeb was writing his master's thesis in information technology, they continued working on the company in the evenings. Louis Loeb was mainly responsible for marketing, sales and business development, while Kenneth Kastaniegaard was in charge of the scientific and technical side.

The first idea didn't quite work out as they had imagined. The existing research data was not always good enough to stand alone, and therefore Biogenity began to work more closely with selected laboratories. The company grew from automated data analysis to a broader role, where clients today can get help all the way from the first hypothesis to fully analysed data.

AAU helped the idea take off

In the company’s early stages, AAU played an important role in validating the idea, and through various local and national support and development programmes, Kenneth Kastaniegaard and Louis Loeb had the opportunity to test the idea, strengthen the business foundation and focus purposefully on the company.

The connection to AAU still exists. Over the years, Biogenity has had bachelor’s and master’s students from fields including medicine, engineering and computer science, and the company is in continuous dialogue with the university about new collaboration opportunities.

Today, Biogenity has clients in Denmark, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Chile, Australia and the US, among others. Now the focus is on automating and scaling the business.

"Over the next handful of years, we should be able to increase our revenue or profit margin by 20-40 per cent a year," says Kenneth Kastaniegaard.