Sundog Bio News | July 2025
Good morning,
We’ve spent July working with what we learned in June: thinking, sketching and refining our vision for the company and product.
To start the month, we spent two days in workshops. It was useful to work together with everything we’ve learned in the last six months. Thinking about everything we’ve learned helped us to focus even more closely on the problems that matter - and make a plan for solving them.
We’ve also made a video of our prototype, for anyone who didn’t get an in-person demo in June. Watch Tom talk you through Sundog, and what we can enable scientists to do, here:
Alex Mitchell | CEO Update
Our vision at Sundog is to make work better for scientists. This doesn’t just mean making it easier to do the things they already do. Making work better means making something new: opening up entirely different ways for biologists to work, both with each other and with their data.
There is plenty that biologists enjoy about the way they work together today. They like sharing new data and collaborating on what it means; they like building new knowledge together. The problem is that the software tools biologists use don’t work like biologists do. They’re designed for a single user, and isolated from the wider conversations that happen in every lab. Sundog is making tools that work like scientists - that have sharing, collaborating and building new knowledge at the centre of everything.
I’m excited to share that we’ve got our first paying lab customer lined up already on the strength of our demo. It’s evidence that our vision is compelling for biologists. We’re looking forward not just to building a product for them, but shaping the product with them, as a tool they’ll use every day as part of their lab.
Tom Armitage | CTO Update
One question I asked in the workshop was: “what would we have done if we’d had another week to finish the demo?” We already knew we were going to make a video demo, to share with people who couldn’t make our interviews, or who might be interested in the future. Before we did that, we had a good opportunity to implement everything that, within the course of two interviews, we’d wished we’d done.
This also proved to be useful prototyping and discovery. In less than a week, I’d added polygon shapes, copy/paste of thumbnails, figure captions, zooming in to show what someone saw when they left an annotation, and a tidied dashboard. All worth it to make the demo better - and to shave off the easy first round of “why don’t you” questions, and get to learning the things we don’t know.
Now we need to experiment again. The technology plan for the summer is to return to prototyping and exploration.
We’ve got new pieces of UI we’d like to try out; particular manipulations we’d like to explore the feasibility of doing in the browser-based image viewer; and new scientific integrations to learn about.
As well as exploring the surface of the product, we’re also going to be experimenting with its foundations, looking into possibly infrastructure and platform choices, diving into the file formats Sundog itself will be storing data within, all to set ourselves up to succeed in the future.
We’re already making progress in that regard - new team-member Richard has been making good progress on a new image library that will make some of our storage issues more straightforward. I’m looking forward to more time collaborating with him, and exploring individual ideas freed from the strictures of our first prototype.
We’re going to build the first iteration of our technical product on solid foundations. Throughout August, alongside that prototyping work, we’ll be continuing our commercial conversations as well - finding a group of alpha customers who will make sure we’re building towards product/market fit.
As always, if you want to talk with us - to see an in-person demo or talk about what we’re doing - we’d love to have that conversation. You can reply to this email, or email alexandra@sundog.bio.