Celebrating 8 Years of iMEAN: A New Chapter of Maturity
This September 2026, iMEAN celebrated its 8th anniversary!
Eight years of developing biological models, building predictive tools, and working alongside our clients to turn complex scientific questions into actionable insights.
This anniversary also marks a significant transition for iMEAN as we move beyond our “Young Innovative Company status”, a supportive French status with tax reduction for startup. For us, this milestone reflects the maturity we have built a strong company over the years: an experienced team with established expertise, a reliable business model, and the tools and organisation to support lasting collaborations.
Eight Years of Experience
Since our creation in 2018, each project has contributed to strengthening our technology and our understanding of our clients’ needs. During 8 years, we’ve conducted 144 projects, building a solid foundation of experience in biological modelling and prediction for iMEAN. Behind these numbers are scientific challenges addressed together, relationships built over time, and a team committed to delivering valuable results.
Growing in Maturity, Strengthening How We Work
Over the past eight years, iMEAN has grown from a market and scientific explorer, where every projects was new, into an established biomodelling company with proven products and services validated with multiples clients!
This year, we have invested significant effort in structuring our modelling workflows, simulation tools, and software infrastructure in order to streamline and optimise repetitive tasks.
For our clients, this means a partner who constantly challenges its own work to deliver faster and to higher quality standards.
Evolving Towards Software and Long-Term Partnerships
Our business model is also evolving to support the changing needs of our clients’ R&D activities.
Our software solutions respond to the growing demand for digitalisation in R&D processes. We’re supporting our clients turn complex data and biological knowledge into practical tools for their everyday research.
From structuring and managing experimental databases to exploring metabolic models and running predictive simulations, we develop software tailored to client scientific objectives and workflows. Historically we build our software infrastructure for internal usage, now, more and more, we train our customer to use these valuable software.
At the same time, our long-term collaboration agreements allow us to support clients as their projects evolve. More and more, our clients who tested our solutions want now to integrate systematically this technology in their daily R&D. Long-term agreements provide continuity in modelling, analysis and scientific development, creating opportunities to build on previous work and address new questions over time with high flexibility.
Together, these developments strengthen our role as a biomodelling partner and reflect the more lasting relationships we are building with our clients.
Advancing Plant Modelling
Plant modelling has been a particular focus of our development efforts this year, with considerable progress in our whole-plant multi-organs models.
Along with significant advances to iMEAN’s plant growth prediction software, iDEMETER !
These progresses illustrate the direction we are taking: connecting biochemical network models (genome-scale metabolic network and regulatory network) at cellular level with multi-organs scale integrated in an agronomical models. This year we finish to plug succesfully hormones kinetics models and regulatory network of plant deveolpment.
To illustrate this ambition we started a PhD candidate project in collaboration with Zahar Haichar at INSA Lyon.
Our ambition is to help our partners make greater use of plant models in their R&D activities, with tools that connect biological complexity to in field agronomical traits.
Moving Forward Together
As we enter our ninth year, our priorities are to further develop our predictive technologies, such as deploying more digital twins and refining the underlying technology, and to strengthen our software offering.
The commitment of our team and the trust of those who work with us have shaped every stage of iMEAN’s journey !
With the maturity gained along the way and the same curiosity that brought us together in 2018, we look forward to this next chapter.
Here’s to eight years of iMEAN, and to the projects, partnerships, and innovations still ahead!