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Sarah Wells

Y Combinator invests in HappiLabs to help scientists shop smarter
 Y Combinator invests in HappiLabs to help scientists shop smarter 150 150 Sarah Wells
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To create life-saving drugs or groundbreaking technological advancements, scientists first need the proper lab equipment. Everything from intricate and expensive specialized machines to beakers and rubber gloves must be sourced, price compared and ordered by a lab manager before even the first steps toward discovery can take place.

But, says Tom Ruginis, CEO and founder of the virtual lab manger startup HappiLabs, the process for finding the best and most cost-effective materials for your lab is far from a standardized process.

“The pricing aspect started catching my attention more and more,” Ruginis told TechCrunch. “The profit margin for lab supplies is extraordinarily large. Scientists don’t know that, and even if they know that it’s really hard for them to shop around. There’s nowhere for them to go.”

As an ex-PhD student and lab manager himself, Ruginis has first-hand experience with the struggles — and shortcuts — necessary to properly stock your lab. After leaving his PhD program in pharmacology, Ruginis took a job as a salesman for a scientific distributor and saw that even labs that were floors apart were paying drastically different prices for the same basic supplies.

Taken aback at how far behind scientific purchasing was from the rest of the retail world, Ruginis began compiling his own spreadsheet of pricing information and, with the help of his then-girlfriend (now wife) Rachel, began designing small price-comparison pamphlets for items like gloves and beakers to distribute to local labs to give them a perspective on the pricing space.

“I went to this one lab that I knew was paying too much,” said Ruginis. “I had data showing that a lab three floors up in their building was paying almost half the price. I went straight to [the lab] and showed [them] this. I asked ‘would you give me $10 for this info and if I kept bringing you more pricing info?’ They gave me $10 and in my head that was our first customer.”

Ruginis says the pamphlets grew from one page to eight and it wasn’t long after that labs began coming to him directly for purchasing guidance and outsourcing. And in 2012, with $20,000 raised from friends and family, he launched HappiLabs as a virtual lab manager for labs, spanning topics from biotech and brain research to robotics.

Since its launch, HappiLabs has grown to 14 employees — comprising six PhD virtual lab managers and eight support staff — and, after earning $1 million in 2017, this summer received a $120,000 investment from Y Combinator .

Actively working with 26 labs across the country, Ruginis says the company is ready to begin incorporating more software and technology into the company and is searching for a CTO to help it reach that goal.

“We’re building an internal software tool that’s strictly for lab managers,” said Ruginis. “What some other companies have done is they’ll try to build a tool and give it to all the lab managers on the planet, but what we’re doing is we’re building a tool for us [first]. We’re going to use it for a few years, make it awesome, and then we’ll end up selling that somewhere down the line as a lab manager software.”

Even further down the road, Ruginis says he imagines creating both hardware and software that can not only be installed in labs across the world (think Alexa for scientists) but even support scientific advancement in labs that are out-of-this-world for future scientists working on the red planet or the ISS.

Apeel Sciences is combating food waste with plant-derived second peels
 Apeel Sciences is combating food waste with plant-derived second peels 150 150 Sarah Wells
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In a world bursting with abundances like self-driving cars and robotic personal assistants, you would think that basic needs like sustainable food sourcing and distribution would be a problem of the past. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), every year roughly a third — 1.3 billion tons — of food grown for consumption is lost or wasted. In industrialized countries like the U.S., this results in a loss of $680 billion per year, and in countries without standardized infrastructure (such as proper cooling systems), this results in a loss of $310 billion per year.

Among the billions of tons of food lost per year, the largest percentage is in vital, nutrient-rich foods like fruits and vegetables and roots and tubers (such as potatoes and carrots), each seeing about 45 percent wasted annually.

There are many factors responsible for food waste, including poorly regulated “Best By” and “Sell By” dates in the U.S. that tempt fickle customers into wasting otherwise good food, and unreliable or non-existent cooling distribution systems in less-industrialized countries.

But an underlying cause of both of these issues, especially for easily spoiled foods, is the inherent shelf life of the food itself. And that’s where Apeel Sciences steps in.

The California-based startup is combating food waste by using plant-derived materials from food itself to create an extra protective barrier to prolong its life and stave off spoilage — essentially, creating a second peel. To create it, farmers just add water to Apeel’s protective powder and apply it to produce as a spray or wash.

For founder and CEO James Rogers, who was working on a PhD in materials engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara when he was inspired to create Apeel Sciences, the solution to the problem of quickly spoiled food could be found by looking to a problem science had already solved: rust.

“Factors that cause spoilage are water loss and oxidation,” Rogers told TechCrunch. “[This] reminded me instantly of my undergraduate days at Carnegie Mellon as a metallurgist studying steel. Steel is perishable as well. It’s perishable because it rusts — it reacts with oxygen in the environment — and [that] limits its use. [But metallurgists] designed a little oxide barrier that would physically protect the surface of that steel, [creating] stainless steel.

Rogers says he began to wonder if a similar method could be used to protect produce from spoiling effects as well.

“Could we create a thin barrier along the outside of fresh produce and in doing that lower the perishability and perhaps make a dent in the hunger problem?”

Apeel was officially founded in 2012 with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for $100,000 to help reduce post-harvest food waste in developing countries that lacked refrigeration infrastructure. To combat this issue, Apeel set up self-service and hybrid distribution systems for farmers in countries like Kenya and Uganda to help protect their produce during its journey from farm to consumer, without the need for refrigeration.

While the company still has a foothold in Africa and Southern Asia, it has also started partnerships with farmers in the U.S. as well, and in May and June of this year introduced the first Apeel produce — avocados — to U.S. retailers Costco and Harps Food Stores.

Because Apeel produce is not genetically modified (but instead plant-derived), they need no special labeling at grocers, but Rogers said the produce wears its scientific design on its sleeve nevertheless.

“We’re not doing anything at the DNA level, there’s no genetic modification, but we want to be really upfront with consumers and actually have them look for the label because by identifying that label they’re going to know that bringing that produce home with them [they’ll have] higher-quality, longer-lasting produce that they’ll be less likely to throw away.”

According to Apeel, since its avocados were introduced to Harps Food Stores, the retailer has seen a 65 percent increase in margin and a 10 percent lift in sales across the avocado category.

With these successes under its belt, Apeel also announced in July the closing of a $70 million funding round led by Viking Global Investors, with Andreessen Horowitz, Upfront Ventures and S2G Ventures participating.

Rogers told TechCrunch that the capital will help the company continue its research and development of new methods to fight food waste, including Apeel sprays for produce like stone fruit and asparagus, and continue to learn from solutions found in nature, “Our [mission] at its core is looking at natural ecosystems to determine and identify what materials it’s using to solve problems and how we might be able to extract and isolate those materials to solve other problems for humanity.”