January 19, 1994 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Marcia Murakami (519)725-4040 Hypercube, Inc. Hypercube to Market HyperChem: Re-acquires Rights from Autodesk WATERLOO, ONTARIO - Hypercube Inc. today announced that it had negotiated a mutual release from its comprehensive Development and License Agreement with Autodesk Inc., dating from July of 1990. The release returns the sales and marketing rights for HyperChem, which had been held by Autodesk, to Hypercube. The mutual release is effective immediately. "We are really excited about getting our products back," said Dr. Neil Ostlund, founder and CEO of Hypercube. "Autodesk helped us get started as a scientific software company, but their focus is really on Computer Automated Design (CAD). We recently launched a companion product to HyperChem called ChemPlus; its success helped convince me that it now makes more sense for us to market our own products." HyperChem is Hypercube's flagship molecular modeling product. Under the previous Development and License Agreement, Autodesk held an exclusive sales and marketing license to HyperChem. Release 2 of HyperChem was first shipped by Autodesk in March of 1992. The current Autodesk version of HyperChem, called Release 3, is sold world wide through distribution and reseller channels. Autodesk will continue to sell HyperChem Release 3 for a short interim period. Dr. Ostlund indicated that Hypercube should begin shipping its new Release 4 of HyperChem within 60 days and that it is expected to be sold through the same channels. "We've worked with Hypercube Inc. before." said John Offerman, the President of National Biosciences, a HyperChem distributor. "We're happy to see them take over the marketing of HyperChem. Their involvement and expertise could really help us." As a result of the new arrangement, Hypercube Inc. will be expanding its range of products and the range of platforms that are supported. "We are now free to market a number of products that we have been working on internally", said Dr. Robert Whiteside, VP of Engineering at Hypercube. "These may include networking, Unix, and NT versions of HyperChem as well as completely new products such as our about-to-be- released HyperNMR, an application for predicting the nuclear magnetic resonance spectra of molecules." Background ========== Hypercube is a privately held scientific software company incorporated in 1985. It previously built and sold turn-key molecular modeling systems that incorporated parallel processing. Its most recent software product is ChemPlus, a set of extensions to HyperChem, released in December of 1993. The company's technical expertise is centered at the boundary between computational chemistry and computer science. As the developer of HyperChem, Hypercube set new standards for ease of use and molecular modeling power on PC- based systems. Hypercube's goal is to bring scientific computing to tens of thousands of new customers. Autodesk is a public company with its headquarters in Sausalito, California. Its flagship product is AutoCAD, a computer-aided design product for engineers, architects and other designers. HyperChem is a molecular modeling software product noted for its ease of use. It is a comprehensive desktop productivity tool for visualizing, analyzing and communicating information about molecular structures. It is the most widely-used molecular modeling software for the Microsoft Windows environment of IBM-compatible PC's. HyperChem is a trademark of Hypercube, Inc. All other trade and product names mentioned are the service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. -- Tom Slee Hypercube, Inc., #7-419 Phillip St., Waterloo, Ont. N2L 3X2 Internet: slee@hyper.com Tel. (519) 725-4040