Our Investment in Science Exchange

About two years ago I found myself in a nondescript neighborhood near the San Francisco Airport. I was parked in front of a house, which resembled most houses on the street. As I walked to the door, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. As I entered, it was clearly some sort of startup flop house with clutter strewn throughout and whiteboards where most in suburbia would be hanging faux-art.

Then I was led into the garage.

Inside was a labyrinth of sheet rock, tarps, pulsating lights and industrial lab equipment. Turns out these flop house residents were actually PhDs from various Ivy League schools building a startup to pursue a new and novel type of therapeutic drug. 

When asked why they chose to build out their own lab as opposed to working in the comfort of the labs at their various alma maters they said there was never any available time for the work they wanted to do. The labs were over scheduled and inaccessible.

That garage and that insight of limited access to equipment and expertise for new types of research stuck with and began to gnaw at me over the last few years. 

There are many reasons for stalls in scientific breakthroughs, but limited access should not be one of them.

Around the same time I found myself in this DIY garage lab, a company was started to tackle this problem of unlocking access and research resources. Their approach was to create a marketplace where researchers could post the projects they needed completed and providers could fullfil those request for a fee. Today, the company has facilitated over 1,000 transactions that each move the advancement of scientific discovery forward in large and small ways

That company’s name is Science Exchange and today we’re please to be included as they announce their latest round of funding. 

We believe they have an opportunity to become a huge marketplace as well as becoming a marketplace whose work will have a huge impact on our society. 

And we’re thrilled to be working with them to build it.