Quartzy, a lab supplies marketplace, announced it has closed a $17 million round in Series B financing to help the startup build up the supply of lab equipment offered to customers.
The startup launched out of Y Combinator four years back and has since partnered with several academic institutions, including Stanford to offer an alternative marketplace for pricier lab supplies. Quartzy does so with a bidding platform to help scientists find less expensive products from competing suppliers.
You can compare what Quartzy does to any logistics management software, but for scientific equipment used for experiments, particularly at academic institutions. Genologics software does this for genomics and mass spec research in labs. Other software also works to help keep track of inventory, but Quartzy contends it’s more than just an Excel spreadsheet system with a built out review database for supplies as well as a mechanism for locating less expensive equipment to suit the needs of the lab.
Read more at CB Insights: https://www.cbinsights.com/company/quartzy-competitors
Eminence Capital led this latest round. Khosla Ventures, which led the Series A round, also joined in for the Series B, along with a number of other investors including the YC Continuity fund, A Capital, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Binary Capital’s Justin Caldbeck, Scribd and Parse founder Tikhon Bernstram, and Factual’s Gil Elbaz.
Eminence is a $6 billion, stage agnostic fund out of New York. The firm often takes large positions in public companies in the life sciences space. Those connections could help Quartzy forge needed partnerships or set it up for a healthy acquisition down the road.Quartzy co-founder Jayant Kulkarni tells TechCrunch he chose Eminance to lead the round particularly because of the deep knowledge and connections
Quartzy co-founder Jayant Kulkarni tells TechCrunch he chose Eminence to lead the round particularly because of the deep knowledge and connections Eminence holds in this industry.
“With [Eminance’s] help we hope to recruit executive talent to help onboard supplies and accelerate the pace at which we can ink deals with leading companies in our space,” Kulkarni said.
Recruitment is a major emphasis for the next stage, but so is a wider range of offerings. The funding will enable Quartzy to improve its marketplace supplies.
“We have the same challenges as most other marketplaces in that we have to go back and forth between the two sides of the marketplace as we build out our business,” Kulkarni told TechCrunch. “After our Series A, we were aggressively focused on driving up demand and getting labs to start using Quartzy. With this new round, we are now turning our attention to building up the supply-side.”
Quartzy currently employs 30 people and plans to build up its sales team in the new year to help onboard new suppliers and institutions needing those supplies. It also plans to release a mobile app and “richer features” for larger pharma/biotech customers on the platform.
We also hear a major retail deal could be in the works for the startup but Quartzy wasn’t ready to name drop just yet. We’ll be sure to let you know about that as soon as we get more details.
The $17 million plus a previous combined raise of $7.87 million in seed and Series A gives Quartzy nearly $25 million in total financing to date.
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