Every software company claims to attack chaos. RockStep Solutions chose a particularly literal variety: an animal-study lab where a scientist changes a protocol, a technician has six timed tasks, a veterinarian flags an adverse event, a vivarium manager moves a cage, and somebody eventually needs to prove exactly what happened. The usual operating system was a stack of paper beside an ambitious spreadsheet.
RockStep's answer is Climb, a cloud platform for non-GLP in vivo research. It handles experimental design, cohort randomization, schedules, assignments, animal health, breeding, census, samples, data capture, audit trails and reports. The nouns sound clinical. The product insight is human: several people touch the same study, at different times, in different rooms, and the context cannot fall off between them.
The originA Friday sacrificed to Excel
The company began in Maine in 2013 with a productive mismatch. Chuck Donnelly was a software engineer who had led computational work at The Jackson Laboratory and, before that, built systems for NASA orbiting platforms and Space Shuttle ground control. Julie Morrison was a microbiologist who had developed contamination assays at IDEXX and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She also knew the duller mechanics of bench work. At one job, she reserved an entire day each week to move observations from paper into Excel.
Morrison joined the young company on equity before it could pay her. She was supposed to help sell. Instead, customer conversations told her the product was not ready for the market the team wanted. This is the useful part of the RockStep story: the founders are unusually clear about what failed first.
“The problem that we're solving is data chaos in drug discovery.”Chuck Donnelly, co-founder
The original workflow engine could accommodate bespoke academic experiments. Routine pharmaceutical research was another animal. A study might require a bleed every hour, a dose twice daily and dozens of linked observations, repeated across cohorts and staff. The system bent where it needed to repeat. Morrison's market work changed their minds: academia had validated the pain, but industry expressed it at higher throughput and with less tolerance for improvisation.
The rebuildThree partners, not three personas
RockStep did not solve the mismatch by polishing a pitch deck. It conducted extensive user research and rebuilt with three design environments: a large public biotech, a global pharmaceutical company and the roughly 50-person Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at UCSF, led by Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner. UCSF was a paying development partner. Its lab helped define requirements across breeding, genetics, veterinary care, biological samples, experiments, screenings, data delivery, resources and scheduling.
That approach created a product broader than an electronic notebook and narrower than generic enterprise software. Climb is purpose-built for exploratory animal studies, where protocols change quickly and flexibility matters, but data still needs history, permissions and traceability. A technician can see today's tasks. A veterinarian can receive a health alert. A study director can change assignments. A data analyst can retrieve the result with its metadata intact. A vivarium manager can trace animals, breeding, cages and census.
It also creates the raw material for better animal welfare and the 3Rs - replacement, reduction and refinement. Better scheduling reduces missed procedures. Cohort randomization limits bias. Shared histories can prevent unnecessary repetition. Software cannot make an experimental choice ethical by itself, but it can make the choice and its consequences visible.
The economicsWhat it cost, and what it charged
RockStep initially financed product development with non-dilutive money. The founders said three NIH grants totaled $1.85 million; state support included Maine Technology Institute grants and matching programs. A $5.3 million Series A followed in August 2022, with later public databases recording additional grant and debt funding. The acquisition price was not disclosed.
The more revealing numbers are prices. In a 2021 interview, Donnelly described early academic customers paying as little as roughly $50 per user while industry seats reached around $1,800. Those figures are historical, not a current rate card. They show how positioning changed the business. Low-price academic deployments got the product into hands and proved the problem. Pharmaceutical customers brought high-throughput use cases and enough lifetime value to support expensive enterprise sales.
The founders also spotted the grant trap. Another grant was available, but its requirements risked pulling the roadmap away from the market. Their decision to stop living grant to grant is easy to admire and hard to copy: non-dilutive capital is attractive precisely because saying no feels irrational. RockStep's rule was sharper. Grants could fund discovery, but customers had to determine the product.
The evidenceLess scheduling, less paper
The company has not published enough standardized customer data to claim a universal return. It has published useful signals. One early customer projected a 70 percent efficiency gain. A later case study from a large contract research organization reported a 45 percent reduction in study-design time, a 90 percent reduction in paper and zero hours of manual scheduling after Climb. Those are customer-specific outcomes, not promises.
The platform grew through an ecosystem, too. A TetraScience partnership connected Climb workflows to a centralized R&D data cloud. LabVoice added hands-free entry and recall, useful when gloves and animals make a keyboard inconvenient. Its voice flow can ask structured questions, scan cage cards, retrieve schedules and check entries against welfare or protocol limits. Charles River Laboratories selected Climb as part of a move away from a homegrown in vivo system toward a best-of-breed model.
This is where Climb differs from broad laboratory information systems and the surprisingly durable alternatives of paper, Excel and homegrown databases. It starts with the dynamic in vivo study, not the generic sample. Its competition includes specialist preclinical suites, enterprise life-science platforms and whatever one heroic lab manager built ten years ago and is now afraid to touch.
The dealThe buyer was missing this exact layer
Instem acquired RockStep on July 28, 2025. The fit is legible on a whiteboard. Instem's Provantis specializes in GLP preclinical study management, where regulated rigor is the point. Climb specializes in the faster-changing non-GLP work that precedes it. Together, the products can follow research from exploratory studies through formal safety work and toward regulatory submission.
Instem chief executive Vik Krishnan later explained that customers had asked for non-GLP capability. His team had already worked with RockStep on integrating Climb and Provantis. Faced with building, partnering or buying, Instem chose the company whose product was already closing the gap. RockStep brought more than technology: Instem said the deal added major pharmaceutical and CRO customers.
Climb did not freeze after the sale. An October 2025 release added country-agnostic severity scoring for animal-welfare reporting, more precise task assignment, international date and CSV formats, and the ability to replace animals during a study. By 2026, Instem said the platform was in use at more than 50 companies worldwide, while RockStep and several other acquired brands began unifying under the Instem name.
The copyable playbookWatch the repeated work
What can another vertical SaaS founder steal? First, follow the work no executive sees. Morrison's lost Excel day was not a metaphor; it was a unit of waste. Second, use early customers to validate pain, then distinguish their requirements from the requirements of the market you want. RockStep's academic network opened the door, but pharma's repetitive schedules shaped the commercial product. Third, make design partnerships reciprocal. UCSF paid and contributed expertise; RockStep built capabilities that could travel.
Fourth, price against the sales motion. A regulated enterprise product that needs integration, trust and change management cannot survive on casual per-seat economics. Fifth, leave the system open enough to join its neighbors. REST connections, scanners, voice capture and the TetraScience data layer helped Climb behave like connective tissue rather than a new silo.
The model will not work everywhere. A small lab with a few simple studies may not recover the cost and implementation effort. A team unwilling to standardize vocabulary or retire shadow spreadsheets will merely create one more system. Weak connectivity, neglected integrations or poorly governed permissions can erase the cloud advantage. And a rigid GLP program may prefer software designed primarily around formal compliance rather than Climb's exploratory flexibility.
But under the right conditions - repeated studies, many roles, material scheduling complexity and a need for trustworthy data across sites - the spreadsheet stops being cheap. It becomes an invisible tax on time, reproducibility and animal care. RockStep built a business by putting a price on that tax. Instem bought it because the same tax appeared in the one part of its preclinical map still left blank.