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Contract Bioinformatics & Scientific Software

Stop paying six figures for code that doesn't work.

You've got the data, the grant, and the deadline. What you don't have is working software — because your last student took a year to ramp up and left with everything in their head. We build the finished system. Tested. Documented. Yours. In weeks, not years.

88 peer-reviewed papers $1.95M in funding delivered 10+ tools shipped & in use h-index 35
Sound familiar?

You didn't get into science to babysit broken code.

You're a PI, not a software shop. But somewhere between the grant and the paper, the bottleneck stopped being the science — and became the code that's supposed to do it. Every one of these is costing you time you don't have and money you already spent.

01Data you can't use

You're sitting on terabytes of sequencing, imaging, or multi-omics data and no pipeline that actually runs on it. The data isn't the problem. Getting an answer out of it is.

02A clock that won't stop

The grant deadline doesn't care that your analysis isn't done. Neither do the reviewers, the progress report, or the collaborator waiting on your figures.

03The six-figure gamble

A postdoc or grad student runs $100–200K a year, takes months to get productive, and then leaves for the next job — taking every undocumented decision with them.

04Code that rots

You inherited thousands of lines of unreadable scripts that break the moment your input changes. Nobody knows how it works. Worse — nobody's sure it's even correct.

05The analysis gap

You have the numbers. You don't have the meaning. And the one person who could bridge that gap has already accepted an offer somewhere else.

06Starting over. Again.

New hire, new ramp-up, new rewrite of the same thing you already paid to build once. The knowledge walks out the door and the meter resets to zero.

ENOUGH.

Stop renting expertise that walks out the door. Buy the finished system — outright.

The choice

The grad-student gamble vs. a system that ships.

One path is a recurring bet on labor that leaves. The other is a fixed-price deliverable you own forever. Line them up honestly and it stops being a hard decision.

The usual way

Hire & hope

  • ✗ $100–200K/yr — plus benefits & overhead
  • ✗ 6–18 months before a single usable result
  • ✗ Undocumented, unrepeatable, "works on my machine"
  • ✗ Leaves with the knowledge in their head
  • ✗ Code breaks the moment you touch it
  • ✗ Then you re-hire and start over
vs
RAW Molecular Systems

Build & own

  • ✓ Fixed scope, fixed price — quoted up front
  • ✓ Weeks to a working system, not years
  • ✓ Pure-Rust or clean Python — tested & documented
  • ✓ Packaged, reproducible, hand-off ready
  • ✓ You own the source — no lock-in, no licensing
  • ✓ Ships once, keeps working for years
Why us

Faster. Better. Cheaper. Pick all three.

You were told you only get two. That's because you were choosing between people who learn on your dime. We already built the hard parts — so the usual trade-off doesn't apply.

Faster

Weeks, not years.

No ramp-up. No learning curve. No reinventing alignment, annotation, k-mer counting, or primer design from scratch — we've shipped all of it before. You get a working system while your grant clock still has time on it.

Better

Built to last.

Every deliverable is pure-Rust or clean, modular Python — tested against your real data, documented, packaged, reproducible. No stubs. No placeholders. No "it worked yesterday." Code that still runs correctly in five years.

Cheaper

A fraction of a hire.

None of the salary, benefits, overhead, turnover, or ramp-up of a postdoc-year. One fixed price, one finished deliverable — and you never pay to build the same thing twice, because you own it.

Proof, not promises

We don't pitch capabilities. We ship tools.

This isn't a slide deck of what we could do. It's software running in labs right now — production pipelines, published methods, and packages researchers install and cite. We build our own tools to a professional standard. We'll build yours the same way.

DagdaRust · genomics

A 100% pure-Rust long-read cancer genomics pipeline — eleven crates, all tests passing, reproducible clean-build verified end to end.

MetaCerberusBioconda

Metagenome and metatranscriptome annotation at scale — a widely used, published tool distributed through Bioconda.

MerlinRust · HMM

A pure-Rust genomic RNA gene finder with full HMMER Plan7 profile search built in — accurate, fast, and self-contained.

SABERRust · GPU

GPU-accelerated sequence alignment — a from-scratch Rust rewrite of SWORD, engineered for throughput on modern hardware.

MerCat2 / RustyCat2Rust + PyO3

High-throughput k-mer counting with a Rust core and Python bindings — the performance of native code with a scripting-friendly API.

DeGenPrimeBioconda

Degenerate PCR primer design, rewritten in Rust for speed and correctness — and packaged for one-command install.

NFixDBBioconda

A curated nitrogen-fixation gene database — data curation, schema design, and distribution done properly.

Pathview / SBGNviewBioconda

Pathway visualization across KEGG, Reactome, and MetaCyc — a full multi-source reimplementation for modern pipelines.

EpiVirQuantBioconda

Viral quantification from sequencing data — turning raw reads into reliable, reportable numbers.

HBKGKnowledge graph

A heterogeneous biological knowledge graph that connects multi-omics evidence — the hard integration work most labs never finish.

Rust, Python (polars · seaborn · matplotlib), PyO3 bindings, GPU acceleration, HMM profile search, knowledge graphs, and Bioconda distribution — the same standard, applied to your problem.

Who's building it

Two decades of computational biology that actually works.

RAW Molecular Systems is led by Dr. Richard Allen White III — Associate Professor of Bioinformatics & Genomics at UNC Charlotte, and a builder first. This isn't a body shop that farms your project to whoever's free.

It's the same group that writes the methods, ships the tools researchers actually use, and wins the grants that fund them. When we say we can build it, it's because we already have — over and over, to a standard reviewers and users trust.

88
peer-reviewed publications
35
h-index
9,000+
citations
$1.95M
in funding secured — NASA, NIH, USDA, NSF, DOE JGI
60+
scientists trained & mentored
10+
research tools shipped & in use
How it works

From your mess to a finished system.

No open-ended hourly contracts. No mystery scope. Four steps, a fixed price, and a deliverable you keep.

01

Send us the mess

Your data, your broken scripts, your half-finished analysis — in whatever state it's in. Messy real-world formats are the normal case, not the exception.

02

Scope & fixed quote

We tell you exactly what we'll deliver, what it costs, and when it lands. No hourly surprises and no scope creep.

03

We build & test

Working code, tested against your real data, documented as we go — Rust where speed matters, clean Python where it doesn't.

04

You own it

Full source, documentation, and a system you can run yourself or hand to anyone. No lock-in, no per-seat fees, no dependence on us.

The math

Do the arithmetic.

One postdoc-year
$100–200K
salary alone
+ 25–40% benefits & overhead
+ 6–18 months of ramp-up
+ they leave when it's finally working
A RAW engagement costs a fraction of that — fixed scope, fixed price, delivered in weeks instead of quarters.
Do it once, own it forever. No renewals, no turnover, no re-hiring, no paying to rebuild the same thing next year.
The grant math changes. Predictable cost, predictable timeline, and a deliverable your reviewers can actually see.
We sign NDAs. Sensitive data and unpublished work stay yours — a mutual NDA can be in place before you send a single file.
Straight answers

What you're actually wondering.

What exactly do you deliver? +
Working, documented source code and the packaged tool — a pipeline, a script suite, an analysis, a database, whatever the scope calls for — tested against your real data. Not a prototype, not a proof of concept. Something you can run, publish from, and hand to anyone.
What languages and stacks do you use? +
Pure Rust for performance-critical pipelines, often with Python bindings via PyO3, and clean, modular Python (polars, seaborn, matplotlib) for analysis and glue. We distribute through Bioconda when you want a one-command install. If you have an existing stack we need to fit into, we work within it.
Can you fix our existing broken code — or does it all get rewritten? +
Sometimes a fix is the right call; just as often it's faster and safer to rebuild it properly. We'll tell you honestly which one you're looking at, and why — before you commit to anything.
Our data is messy / huge / in a weird proprietary format. +
That's the normal case, not the exception. Reading, validating, and wrangling ugly real-world data is most of the job in bioinformatics, and it's exactly the part we're good at. Send it as-is.
Do you sign NDAs? +
Yes. We routinely work under mutual NDA and can have one in place before you send anything sensitive. Unpublished data and pre-grant ideas stay yours.
Who owns the finished code? +
You do. Full source, full rights, no lock-in, no per-seat licensing, and no ongoing dependence on us to keep it running. Own it outright.
How fast is "fast"? +
Most focused engagements deliver in weeks. Because we've already built the hard parts — alignment, annotation, k-mer counting, primer design, pathway visualization, knowledge graphs — you're not paying us to learn on your grant.
How do we start? +
Send a short description of your data and what you need out of it. We'll come back with a concrete scope, a fixed price, and a timeline — no obligation to proceed.
Let's talk

Your data isn't getting any newer. Ship it.

Send us the data, the deadline, and the mess. We'll send back a fixed scope, a fixed price, and a finished system — faster, better, and cheaper than the postdoc you're still waiting on.

Get a fixed quote →

Prefer to talk it through first? Get in touch — tell us what's stuck.