Good morning, everybody. My name is Peter Nahlstedt, CEO of SenzaGen. I'm going to tell you about the growth story around SenzaGen, who the company is, what we're doing, how we're going to grow the company, and finish off with five great reasons why you should increase your holdings in SenzaGen, because, of course, you have already invested in this company, which is a real growth story. Since 2021, we've grown the company 600%, of which almost 400% organic with our GARD business, and I will go into what the GARD business is about. We have a very stable gross margin at around 67%, and we have now been showing that we can scale the company because we are very fast approaching break-even. We have a solid financial situation so that we can invest in growth initiatives that will develop the company over the years to come.
Our vision at SenzaGen is to replace animal testing, but not only to replace animal testing, also to protect with the purpose of protecting human health. We are a group of three companies: SenzaGen, based here in Lund; we have developers of a GARD platform; we are experts in something called non-animal toxicology. I'm sure the audience in this room knows very much about that. We make up about 65% of the revenues for the group in 2024, 21 employees. In 2021, SenzaGen acquired a business in Milan, Italy, called VitroScreen. VitroScreen is experts in 3D tissue models and are extending the reach of the group into efficacy testing, so testing the efficacy of drugs, cosmetics, or medical devices. In 2022, we made another complementary acquisition of a company called ToxHub.
ToxHub is an advisory firm, and they provide regulatory support, regulatory and strategic advice in toxicology and pharmacology, whereby they help drive the testing business. The non-animal testing market is really growing and is quite large, so we estimate the market estimates it's now at $13 billion worldwide market around toxicology, non-animal, and efficacy testing non-animal. We have broken it down into the SenzaGen group serviceable market around $500 million. The market growth is estimated to be between 6.5% and 9.5% in the years to come, and there are some really important growth drivers. We have scientific progress because humans and animals are not the same. For instance, our GARD platform measures skin sensitization. We used to do that on mice to measure safety on mice. The problem is one of the most common skin sensitizers, nickel, is not sensitizing mice.
If we test chemicals on mice, we're going to miss a lot. Regulations are driving the progress because there are animal bans, like in the EU, there is a cosmetic animal test ban active since 2014, and other countries are coming. Non-animal testing is more cost-effective, and there is also an increased social engagement with companies to reduce animal testing. Europe and North America are the most important marketplaces, and we are industry agnostic, so this is happening in pharma, medical device, cosmetic, and chemical industry, to mention a few. We are working with some of the largest brands in the world who have gone over and tested on the GARD platform: L'Oréal in the cosmetic space, for instance. I have ExxonMobil on the screen about the chemicals, and Clarins about cosmetics and other brands.
As you can see, large brands, and these are, of course, only the brands we are allowed to talk about in public. Going into how the company is doing, in quarter three, we are listed on First North, so we release quarterly earnings. We have continued growth, and we have break-even. Our sales ended up in SEK 15.2 million. That is a growth of 15%, or in constant currencies, around 18%. Our GARD platform grew 12% or 15% in constant currencies. We maintained this scalable gross margin of 66%, and since we are careful about the costs, we were then hitting break-even. Great quarter for us to get back on growth and to have a good break-even in the quarter. The growth came from the GARD platform. We grew 12% quarter- on- quarter.
We continue to add customers, 10 new, and we have also great loyalty with the existing customer base. We had two big orders from the U.S. It's a little uncommon. We usually have 75% of sales in the EU, but in Q3, we had half of the sales from America. There were two big: one big pharma company placing an order and another one from the chemical industry. Yesterday, we announced another big order, $2.5 million coming in from the technology sector. As you can see, the growth and the sales are coming from many areas. We got a very important regulatory approval called OECD TG 497. It means that GARD is approved as a combination method with a couple of other methods to have regulatory compliance. We've kept a very high sales and cost focus in the group. This is how the company is doing now.
We think that we are on the way to grow faster. We have four initiatives: establish guarding devices, advance the GARD platform through upgrades and approvals, scale with new innovations, and then finally continue to expand our market reach. This is how we sort of play that out in the short term. Short term, we think that the company is in its break-even phase. During the break-even phase, SenzaGen will continue to grow along our current trajectory under increasing profitability. We have some, because of the approval I mentioned in the previous slide, we can now extend GARD into standard testing from more specific and specialized testing. In the midterm, we expect to accelerate sales substantially. We have the initiative ongoing to get GARD as the first ISO standard method for non-animal testing in skin sensitization, and it means a lot.
I think to give you a perspective, we do around 300 tests on the GARD platform this year. The medical device sector in Europe performs around 1,000 tests a year. The U.S. market is expected to be twice as big. We are at the forefront in becoming the first and maybe also only standard test. This is a big deal, and it's going to drive our sales substantially. Long term, or still long term in our perspective, means before 2030, we're going to hit a scale-up phase with the company because with the medical device, we are going to accelerate the growth, but we have other initiatives at early stage in the group to go into a couple of other sectors. That will help us to grow.
At the same time, we think that the U.S. market, which has been a little bit behind Europe, but the news this year from FDA and NIH tells a clear story. They expect a movement over to non-animal testing methods. We think that this market will develop fast, and we're going to be ready for it, especially with the device and the different license and partners that we have been setting up. That's going to drive and scale up the company further. We have performed two great acquisitions, VitroScreen and ToxHub, which have really added to the value of the company. We can expect to perform other M&A activities in this exciting field during these three phases. With that, I would like to finish off with why SenzaGen is such a great investment case. One, we have a great market, large, growing.
Two, we are really at the forefront of this trend to switch over from animal testing to non-animal testing with our technology, and the trends are there also regulatory-wise to do nice to do into must do. We are really a technology leader in an important field of skin sensitization and other areas. We have now, for the last years, proven that we have a scalable model. Finally, also proven that we have the right team who can grow the company organically, take products and services through regulatory approvals, perform acquisitions, and get companies into break-even. Thanks a lot for your attention, and I welcome some questions, maybe.
Definitely. I 've got a couple of questions for you. The first question is actually quite basic. It's how the GARD test actually works. Minor details.
It's a basic question, but yes, it's a genomics and machine learning-based platform consisting of a human cell. It's a dendritic cell line, very important for the immune response of a skin sensitization. We measure 196 biomarkers when we expose this cell with skin sensitizers or potential skin sensitizers. We then read out the gene expression using an algorithm which has been machine learning trained, and we read out whether skin sensitizing or not.
That's quite simple.
Yes.
The next follow-up question to that was what the competition is like. Is there anything else similar?
Yes, there are some, of course. There is the animal testing field, of course. Then non-animal test methods are available. We call them first generation. Usually, they measure one specific chemical sector. And that's sort of on the method side. On the company side, we have some big dragons in this field, Charles River and Eurofins, and some smaller niche players, which we think are interesting competition. Again, looking at the GARD platform, genomics, AI, machine learning-based, there is not really an alternative.
As a final question, we've got a question about the revenue model. If it's recurring, and if yes, what's the average contract period?
That's a great question. Yes, the goal of us is, and what usually happens is that one of these large companies I alluded to and showed on one of my slides, they test the platform and test if this is suitable for their type of product, and then become convinced that this works, and then they incorporate it into their standard battery of testing. We actually have around, we had in Q3 about 85% of our revenue were from recurring customers.
Thank you so much, Peter, and I'm sure you'll be around in the break if someone else wants to ask.
Yes, absolutely. Thanks a lot.
Thank you so much.