“feno” was adapted from “pheno” as in phenotype (n), phenotyping (v) and phenomics
    We are a SaaS (System as a Service) startup based in San Francisco bay area, founded in 2014 by Zhi, an engineer and PhD in neurobiology. Our small but agile team consists of a fulltime electric and firmware engineer, and a full stack web/mobile programmer, plus Zhi who has spent almost 10 years in biomedical research. If you contact us, chances are that you will be talking to the person who has designed every detail or written every line of code.
    When Zhi was in graduate school evaluating a strategy to treat Alzheimer disease, he was constantly frustrated by the inefficiency and incapability of then available tools to phenotype mice, and general tools needed by research labs such as freezer monitoring system. So as a result, Zhi started Fenotech to make a difference, starting with the freezer monitoring system.
A home security system was built in our founder, Zhi's basement. It was built with Arduino, Xbee, and SIM900 cellular modem. It detects openning of doors and sends out SMS when certain is not supposed to be open at the time.
This home-brew security system eventually evolved into our first product FenoLabs.
Fenotech, the final company name was suggested over Fenometech by Dr. Filiano, a long term friend of Zhi.
Encouraged by the success of building a home security system and protecting home on a budget, Zhi started to seriously look into possible application of IoT technology into phenotyping of mice. Starting a company to pursue the idea became a natural choice.
Among candidates like phenomescientific, phenometech, fenometech, fenotech, Fenotech was chosen for its simplicity and similarity to Genentech.
Two mice, one illustrated by a cartoon, another one illustrated by a combination of phenol rings, Symbolize company’s mission to facilitate the use of mice in biomedical research.
Phenol rings are heavily used in the logo because they are the structural basis of many neurotransmitters.
Color orange was chosed because "Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation."
Fenotech was incorporated in the San Francisco bay area, a hub of both IT and biotech. Zhi started to work on FenoLabs full-time after graduation from GradSchool.
Having suffered enough from instability of another monitoring system, folks at MTL decided to give FenoLabs a try.
Hooray! First customer from company side! While FenoLabs was originally designed as a simple and affordable tool for loss prevention, input from folks at MTL transformed FenoLabs into a full-fledged facility monitoring platform.
Requested by many early users, we sped up development of mobile app and released it ahead of roadmap.
Ajax technology was broungt in to enable easy interactive operations such as logging corrective actions, updating settings, managing users.
Also responsiveness of website was greatly improved.