Project Management Software for Biotechnology
Research timelines are genuinely uncertain, but the funding milestone attached to them isn't. ShipSprint tracks programme progress against that milestone honestly, without pretending it's a lab system.
The experiment doesn't know the funding round has a date
Biotech R&D has a structural mismatch that most project tools ignore: the research itself is genuinely uncertain (an assay might work on the third attempt or the tenth, a compound might clear a screen or not) while the funding attached to it runs on a schedule that doesn't care. A milestone tied to a Series B tranche or a grant renewal arrives on its date regardless of what the science decided to do that quarter.
Standard project tools force a choice that doesn't fit: treat the programme like a fixed-scope engineering project with a date that's mostly fiction, or abandon structure entirely and lose the ability to tell investors or a board anything credible about progress. Neither is honest, and both make the actual reporting conversation harder than it needs to be.
ShipSprint's forecasts are built from measured pace rather than a plan drawn up on day one, which suits research better than a fixed Gantt chart does. The forecast adapts as the team's real throughput becomes clear, rather than insisting on an estimate made before anyone had run a single experiment. It won't tell you whether the science will work. It will tell you, honestly, whether the programme's current pace is converging on the funding milestone or drifting from it.
What an R&D programme team runs on
Built for tracking programme progress toward a funding milestone, not for managing the lab itself.
Asks between wet-lab, computational and regulatory-affairs staff land in a triage inbox instead of scattered across email threads, so a dependency doesn't sit unassigned because it crossed a team boundary.
Per-column WIP limits stop a data-review or write-up stage from silently backing up behind lab work that's already finished, and work is planned against the team's real bandwidth rather than an aspirational timeline.
Delivery forecasts run off the team's measured velocity as sprints close, so as real throughput data accumulates, the projection toward a funding milestone gets more honest, rather than staying anchored to a day-one estimate nobody still believes.
Hours sit next to the task just finished and take about five seconds, which matters for researchers who resent time-tracking overhead eating into actual bench or analysis time.
A built-in wiki with page history holds the reasoning behind a protocol change or a go/no-go call next to the tasks it affects, useful when a programme spans years and the person who made a call has since moved on.
The owner command center rolls every programme into a single screen, and a Monday digest arrives without a programme lead assembling a milestone update from scratch each time the board asks.
A funding cycle, walked through
Right after a raise closes, the programme lead breaks the funded plan into workstreams, assay development, a screening campaign, a regulatory pre-submission track, each on its own board, staffed against the team that actually exists rather than the hypothetical team in the pitch deck.
A few months in, an experiment doesn't work the way anyone expected, and the programme genuinely has to pivot: a new assay approach, a different target. That pivot gets written up as a wiki page next to the affected board, with the reasoning intact, so when a board member asks "why did the approach change" eight months later, the answer isn't reconstructed from someone's memory of a meeting.
As the next funding milestone approaches, the forecast, by now built from real sprint history rather than day-one guesswork, gives the programme lead an honest read on whether the milestone will land on time. That's early enough to have a candid conversation with the board about a timeline adjustment rather than discovering the gap during the milestone review itself, in front of the people deciding on the next tranche.
What this is not
ShipSprint has no LIMS integration and does not connect to lab instruments or sample-tracking systems; that data stays in whatever LIMS or ELN the lab already runs. It also carries no GxP validation and makes no claim of one; if a workflow requires a validated system under GxP, this is not that system, and it should not be represented as one in any internal or regulatory documentation.
What it is: a place to plan and track the programme-management layer around the science, milestones, cross-functional coordination, funder and board reporting, sitting alongside your lab systems rather than replacing or validating any part of them.
If a workflow needs to move data between the programme-management layer and a LIMS or ELN, that has to happen manually or through whatever integration those systems support on their own end. ShipSprint doesn't attempt to bridge that gap, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong kind of shortcut for regulated lab data.
Progress on the programme, not hours at the bench
No screenshots, no keystroke logging, no activity tracking. Research doesn't happen on a predictable clock, and a system that judged researchers on visible busyness would be measuring the wrong thing entirely. What's recorded is delivered milestones and logged hours, nothing about how the time was spent getting there.
Scorecards are visible to the person they describe and adjusted for leave, which matters for teams where a researcher might be heads-down on one experiment for two weeks and then genuinely idle waiting on results. Neither pattern should look like a problem in a report.
One subscription for research and the functions around it
A biotech programme rarely runs on research alone: there's HR hiring specialised staff, regulatory affairs preparing filings, and operations managing vendor and reagent logistics. Each gets its own templates in one subscription, so the whole programme is visible from the same command center rather than fragmented across four departmental tools.
ShipSprint also connects to Claude and ChatGPT, so a programme lead can ask which milestone is trending off pace toward the next funding tranche in plain language, without exporting data first.
What it costs
Runway is the defining constraint for most funded research programmes, so software spend has to justify itself against months of burn saved, not against a feature checklist.
- Free covers 5 users and 2 projects, forever, realistic for an early-stage team running one or two research programmes before a larger round. Team is ₹299/user/month or ₹2,899/user/year for up to 40 users; Business is ₹599/user/month or ₹6,499/year with forecasts, scorecards and the owner command center.
- Billing is per seat in rupees with GST-compliant invoices, and annual billing is available.
- Every paid plan opens with a 14-day full-access trial on Business, sample project preloaded, no card required, enough to see how the forecast behaves against a few real sprints of programme work.
Starting with one programme
A multi-programme research organisation doesn't need to migrate everything at once. A common starting point is the single programme closest to its next funding milestone, where an early honest read on pace matters most, run through a handful of sprints before deciding whether the rest of the portfolio follows.
Because Free covers up to 5 users and 2 projects indefinitely, an early-stage team with one or two active programmes can genuinely operate there long-term rather than treating it as a time-limited trial that forces a decision before the science has told them anything.
Common questions
No to both, plainly. ShipSprint carries no GxP validation and makes no claim of one, and it has no LIMS or lab-instrument integration. It manages the programme layer, milestones, coordination, reporting, around the science, not the regulated lab data itself, which should stay in the systems built and validated for that purpose.
It doesn't predict experimental outcomes, nothing can. What it does is measure the team's actual completed-work pace sprint over sprint and project that forward, which is a more honest basis than a fixed-date plan drawn up before any results existed. As real throughput accumulates, the forecast gets more useful, not less.
Many programme leads do, for exactly the coordination and status layer it covers, which milestones are tracking, which are drifting, and why. It doesn't replace a data package or scientific report for a board; it's the operational view that sits underneath one.
Every workspace is an isolated tenant regardless of company size or plan, two-factor authentication is available to every user, and admin actions are logged. The whole workspace exports as JSON at any time on a paid plan, so an early-stage team isn't locked in as it grows or changes tooling.
Yes, a research programme rarely sits in one function alone, and boards can represent wet-lab, computational and regulatory-affairs workstreams side by side within the same programme, with a single wiki holding decisions that cut across all three. The owner command center then shows the whole programme's progress in one place rather than three disconnected views.
Related pages
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