Science Exchange is a cloud-based software company offering an R&D marketplace to buy and sell scientific services. The marketplace gives life sciences companies access to the outsourced research they need and the platform fully automates R&D outsourcing from source to pay. Commercial

contract research organization In the life sciences, a contract research organization (CRO) is a company that provides support to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries in the form of research services outsourced on a contract basis. A CRO may provide ...

s (CROs) and academic core facilities can sell their products and services directly through the marketplace. Science Exchange's enterprise clients include top pharma and emerging biotechnology companies, including Merck,

Amgen Amgen Inc. (formerly Applied Molecular Genetics Inc.) is an American multinational biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. One of the world's largest independent biotechnology companies, Amgen was established in ...

Gilead Sciences Gilead Sciences, Inc. () is an American biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Foster City, California, that focuses on researching and developing antiviral drugs used in the treatment of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, influenza, and ...

, and

Genentech Genentech, Inc., is an American biotechnology corporation headquartered in South San Francisco, California. It became an independent subsidiary of Roche in 2009. Genentech Research and Early Development operates as an independent center within ...

. Science Exchange was founded in 2011 by

Elizabeth Iorns Elizabeth Jane Iorns (born 31 December 1980) is a New Zealand scientist, entrepreneur and researcher, and the founder and CEO of Science Exchange, a Silicon Valley startup which operates a platform to allow scientists to outsource their researc ...

, Ryan Abbott, and Dan Knox, taking part in the startup accelerator program

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...

in the summer of 2011.

History

In 2011, while an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Iorns came up with the idea for Science Exchange after needing to conduct immunology experiments, but having difficulty finding potential collaborators or providers to work with. Iorns formed Science Exchange with Knox and Abbott, and the company applied for a place in the Y Combinator startup accelerator program. The company was accepted into the Summer 2011 batch of Y Combinator and launched the first version of its website in August 2011. In 2012 Iorns was recognized by the Kauffman Foundation for her role in starting Science Exchange.

Business model

Science Exchange is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), with customers paying an annual subscription fee.

Projects

Reproducibility initiative

In August 2012 Science Exchange partnered with the open-access scientific publisher

Public Library of Science PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012 ) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launc ...

(PLOS) to launch the Reproducibility Initiative, a program developed to assist researchers in validating their findings by repeating their experiments through independent laboratories. The program is facilitated by the Science Exchange platform, which matches scientists with experimental service providers according to areas of expertise. Iorns has been a longtime spokesperson on the issue of

reproducibility Reproducibility, also known as replicability and repeatability, is a major principle underpinning the scientific method. For the findings of a study to be reproducible means that results obtained by an experiment or an observational study or in a ...

in academic research. In 2013 Science Exchange partnered with the

Center for Open Science The Center for Open Science is a non-profit technology organization based in Charlottesville, Virginia with a mission to "increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research." Brian Nosek and Jeffrey Spies founded the o ...

to reproduce findings from widely cited published research in the field of cancer research. The goal of the study, called the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RP:CB), is to find common reasons explaining why aspects of experiments are hard to reproduce by independent laboratories. In January 2017, the first five replication studies of the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RP:CB) were published. Three more RP:CB replication studies were published in June 2017.

Independent validation program

On 30 July 2013 Science Exchange launched a program with reagent supplier antibodies-online.com, based in Aachen, Germany, to independently validate research antibodies.

Investors

In June 2011, Science Exchange received a $100,000 investment from StartFunds'

Yuri Milner Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner (russian: Юрий Борисович (Бенционович) Мильнер; born 11 November 1961) is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist. He is a cofounder and former c ...

, a $50,000 investment from angel investor

Ron Conway Ronald Crawford Conway (born March 9, 1951) is an American venture capitalist and philanthropist. He has been described as one of Silicon Valley's " super angels". Early career Conway graduated from San Jose State University with a bachelor's d ...

, and a $20,000 investment from Y Combinator as part of participating in the startup accelerator program. In December 2011 the company announced it had closed a $1.5-million seed financing round led by

Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Andreessen H ...

. In May 2013 the company closed a $4-million Series A financing round led by

Union Square Ventures Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, Flurr ...

Tim O'Reilly Tim O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0. Education and early life Born in County Cork, Ireland, Tim O'Reilly moved to San Francisco, Ca ...

's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and several leading angel investors including

Esther Dyson Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a Swiss-born American investor, journalist, author, commentator and philanthropist. She is the executive founder of Wellville, a nonprofit project focused on improving equitable wellbeing. Dyson is also an an ...

Joshua Schachter Joshua Schachter (; born January 1, 1974) is an American entrepreneur and the creator of Delicious, creator of GeoURL, and co-creator of Memepool. He holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg ...

Lisa Gansky Lisa Gansky (born May 1, 1961) is an American entrepreneur and author. She was the co-founder and CEO of Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial website, which was acquired by America Online (AOL). She was also the co-founder, CE ...

and

. In March 2016 the company announced it had closed a $25-million Series B financing round led by

Lee Ainslie Lee S. Ainslie III is the head of hedge fund Maverick Capital. He is a value investor that is particularly known for his investments in the technology sector. Early life and education Ainslie's father was headmaster of Episcopal High School, a p ...

's Maverick Capital. In June 2017 Science Exchange raised $28-million in Series C funding, led by

Norwest Venture Partners Norwest Venture Partners (Norwest) is an American venture and growth equity investment firm. The firm targets early to late-stage venture and growth equity investments across several sectors, including cloud computing and information technology, ...

. In October 2019, the company announced it had raised an additional $20 million in financing, from a combination of equity and debt sources. Maverick Ventures and

led the financing.

References

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External links

Science Exchange website
Companies based in Palo Alto, California Freelance marketplace websites Scientific databases Metascience Online marketplaces of the United States Employment websites in the United States