Why we’re unifying under the Labbit name
Semaphore was started in 2010 as a services company. We spent years working with regulated labs, exposed to many of the major LIMS on the market, learning what worked and what didn't. That work is what led us to build Labbit. And over the last few years, Labbit has become everything we do. Today, we're making that official by bringing everything under the Labbit name.
For those who work with us today, nothing will change. This consolidation under Labbit is simply an external reflection of what we’re already doing. Our services remain an integral part of how we make labs successful, and customers can continue to expect the same depth of expertise and support they have come to rely on.
Where We Started, and What We Learned
Semaphore began by working with some of the most demanding laboratories in the industry. We saw the same pattern repeatedly: labs spending significant time and resources bending their LIMS to fit rigid architecture. Many stopped trying to improve their systems altogether; the cost and risk of change was simply too high. Instead, they built workarounds: entire operational processes designed to accommodate what the software could not do.
As our services business grew, we made a deliberate decision to not build a LIMS until we understood and internalized the experiences and lessons from our partners. That meant years of deep implementation work, including more than 400,000 hours across complex LIMS environments. We were not theorizing about laboratory complexity from the outside. We were writing custom solutions inside it, repeatedly, across different customers and environments. This repetition made clear precisely what a modern platform needed to solve, and what the existing LIMS lacked. The expertise we gained through that process is the foundation of how and why Labbit was built.
Labbit: Designed for How Labs Actually Work
Labbit was not designed by improving on what existed. We set the existing approaches aside and asked a more fundamental question: what does a modern, ambitious, regulated laboratory actually need from an informatics platform? This led us to build Labbit around three things we saw labs struggling with over and over: workflows that couldn't adapt without breaking, data that lost meaning the moment it was saved, and change management that was so painful most labs just avoided it.
Customers who evaluate Labbit tend to reach the same conclusion quickly: the product actually works within the complexities of real labs. And the market agrees; Semaphore Solutions (Labbit) was named a Representative Vendor in the 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Laboratory Information Management Systems, recognized for exactly these capabilities.
Why Labbit’s Vision Matters More Than Ever
Across every segment we serve, from clinical diagnostics to biotech to manufacturing, the pressure on laboratory informatics is increasing. Processes are more complex, the pace of change is faster, and labs can’t tolerate LIMS that slow down their business.
Data, too, has become a strategic asset in ways that older LIMS architectures were never designed to support. Research and development is no longer a linear process, findings from one program routinely inform others, sometimes years later. A LIMS should not be where that data goes to die. Labbit’s architecture ensures it doesn’t: data is FAIR by design, findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
Labbit’s capabilities as a business and laboratory system-of-record are even more important as organizations race to adopt AI. Labbit captures laboratory data in an RDF Knowledge Graph, fully preserved with context and provenance, readable by every consumer that needs it, human or machine. Labbit uniquely captures the meaning of laboratory data, making it a foundational platform for AI transformation.
Our Next Phase as Labbit
While we move forward solely under the Labbit banner, we carry with us the decade-plus of hard-won expertise built under the Semaphore name. That legacy of solving complex problems is woven into the foundation of everything Labbit is today. Our focus remains on providing customers with an informatics platform that adapts as their complex science evolves.
We launched Labbit after seeing firsthand how much effort labs were wasting accommodating systems that could not accommodate them. Six years later, that is still the problem we are here to solve. The Labbit name now reflects this mission even more clearly.
