The Man Who Runs
Science's Supply Chain
Jayant Kulkarni didn't set out to build a company. He set out to finish a PhD. The problem with being a PhD student, though, is that you spend a significant portion of your time not doing science - you spend it chasing orders, tracking down missing reagents, emailing suppliers, and updating spreadsheets that were obsolete the moment you saved them. Kulkarni noticed this. Then he did something about it.
In 2011, fresh from a Swartz Fellowship at Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience - where he'd been building computational models of how brains process information - Kulkarni co-founded Quartzy with his Columbia colleague Adam Regelmann. The pitch was simple: give labs a free, cloud-based tool to manage orders and inventory. No complex sales cycle, no enterprise procurement nonsense. Just something that actually worked for scientists.
They named it Quartzy. Not for branding reasons, not because of market research. Because Kulkarni and Regelmann were Scrabble enthusiasts, and "quartzy" is the highest-scoring word achievable in a single move. The kind of detail that tells you something about how these founders think: precise, specific, quietly obsessive about optimization.
When a reagent doesn't show up, research stops. By owning the software, the supplier relationships, and the fulfillment infrastructure, we can guarantee the reliability, pricing, and accountability that labs depend on - and that fragmented solutions simply can't deliver.- Jayant Kulkarni, April 2026
Control Theory in the Lab
There's a thread running through Kulkarni's career that only makes sense in retrospect. His PhD at Cornell was in control systems - the engineering discipline that asks: how do you design a system to behave predictably, to reach a desired state despite disturbance? He then applied those instincts to neuroscience at Columbia, modeling how the brain regulates its own signals. And then, at Quartzy, he applied them to labs: how do you design a procurement system that behaves reliably despite the thousand tiny disturbances of a research environment?
The answer, he's concluded, is vertical integration. Don't just make the software. Own the supplier relationships. Own the fulfillment infrastructure. Own the data that connects them. This is not the typical SaaS founder's playbook - usually, you pick one layer and go deep. Kulkarni decided that in life sciences procurement, fragmentation itself is the enemy, and the only way to beat it is to collapse the stack.
From Post-Doc to Y Combinator
The early milestones came fast. In 2010, before Quartzy had formally launched, Kulkarni and Regelmann entered Washington University's Olin Cup business plan competition - and won, beating out 44 other teams. In 2011, they got into Y Combinator's Summer batch, which put them in the room with the best startup founders in the world and gave them the credibility and network to accelerate. That same year, Business Insider named them Startup of 2011.
The company's growth followed the product's logic. Labs started using the free management software. Then the biotech companies started using it. Then someone asked: can we actually buy the supplies through here? And Kulkarni said yes. In 2018, Quartzy launched its Shop marketplace, initially offering three million products from 1,000+ suppliers. By 2020, it had grown to 400,000 researchers, 12,000+ academic labs, and customers including Beyond Meat, Gilead, AbbVie, and Patheon by Thermo Fisher.
The April 2026 Raise
On April 13, 2026, Quartzy announced $23 million in financing from Avenue Capital Group and BroadOak Capital Partners. The announcement wasn't about survival - it was about going deeper. Kulkarni described the capital as fuel to build further down every layer of the stack: faster fulfillment, smarter software, better pricing on the products scientists use every day.
The company now serves more than 3,000 organizations and offers access to over 10 million products through the Quartzy Shop. Total funding raised exceeds $74 million, including earlier rounds through Y Combinator, a $4 million Series A, a $17 million Series B, and the 2026 venture financing.
If the 20th century was the age of physics, the 21st century is the age of biology. And biology can't move forward if scientists are stuck chasing orders on a spreadsheet.- Quartzy brand positioning, paraphrased from company materials
The Founder Who Doesn't Oversell
There's a certain kind of tech founder who builds a grand narrative first and figures out the product later. Kulkarni is not that founder. By his own account, there was no sweeping vision behind Quartzy - they were solving a specific, practical problem they'd personally experienced. The name came from a Scrabble game. The marketplace came because users asked for it.
What Kulkarni has done, quietly and without much noise, is build something genuinely used - not just funded or talked about, but relied upon. Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, and Princeton researchers use Quartzy. So does a biotech startup with six scientists sharing a bench. The platform spans the full range of what "life sciences" means in 2026, from early-stage discovery to large-scale production.
His LinkedIn headline reads: "Accelerating the pace of scientific discovery." It's the kind of phrase that could easily be dismissed as corporate positioning. But look at the math - 400,000 researchers, 25,000 organizations, 10 million products, one platform keeping the supply chain running - and it starts to sound less like a tagline and more like a status report.
Academic Path
Achievements
Latest Updates
- Apr 2026 Quartzy closed $23 million in financing from Avenue Capital Group and BroadOak Capital Partners to deepen its vertically integrated life sciences procurement platform.
- Dec 2024 Kulkarni posted on LinkedIn about exciting milestones at Quartzy in 2024, highlighting 50% growth and key company achievements.
- Sep 2020 Quartzy announced VP of Marketing hire and reported soaring SaaS demand, with 400,000+ researchers and 12,000+ academic labs on platform.