From researcher to entrepreneur
In 2015, as a postdoc researcher, Garry Cooper was helping to clean out a lab freezer one day when he realized that he was throwing away bagfuls of antibodies, a common, yet pricey, research tool for identifying proteins.
Resolving to address this problem of waste, Cooper decided to create a company to reduce wasteful spending and promote trading among colleagues. He envisaged it as a kind of eBay, Craigslist and Ask.com rolled into one, providing lab scientists with a valuable service at a time when research funding is increasingly hard to come by. He, along with two other cofounders, called the start-up Rheaply, a portmanteau of ‘research’ and ‘cheaply.’ Now, Rheaply has grown into a well-established technology company that works with clients ranging from research universities to large corporations, helping them better manage their assets, reduce procurements costs as well as their environmental impact.
Rheaply has been recognized as a member of Techstars Chicago 2018, Built In Chicago's 50 Startups to Watch in 2018, VERGE 19 Finalist, as well as a Circular Economy Solver at MIT SOLVE 2019. Rheaply has also been featured in Nature, and a Circular Economy paper published by Google and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a leader in accelerating our global transition to the circular economy.