He doesn't want to sell you medical supplies. He wants software to do your shopping - and hand you the savings.
The bioengineer who chose the pandemic over the climate crisis - and built a company out of the decision.
Picture the person inside a hospital whose job is to buy gloves, gauze, syringes, and the thousand other things a clinic burns through in a week. They call vendors. They compare quotes. They get the price they get. Luká Yancopoulos thinks that whole ritual is a tax on care - and Grapevine Technologies, the company he co-founded and runs, is his answer to it.
Grapevine is not a marketplace and it is not a middleman. It is software that acts on behalf of the buyer - reading across vendors, prices, and supply routes in real time, then using that visibility to push savings back to the provider. The pitch is almost rude in its simplicity: stop shopping, and still know you got the best price.
He is blunt about the ambition. Grapevine's stated goal is to drop the average national spend on medical supplies by roughly half, and eventually to make the act of shopping for them unnecessary. For a market estimated at $200 billion - about $80 billion of it spent just on supply chain operations - that is either hubris or a very large opportunity. Yancopoulos is betting it is the second one.
The only thing that grows for the sake of growth is a cancer.
Yancopoulos grew up in Yorktown Heights, New York, the son of a prominent scientist and a nurse practitioner. He arrived at the University of Pennsylvania as a VIPER student - a competitive dual-degree program pairing engineering with energy research - convinced that climate change was the single greatest threat he could spend a life fighting. He majored in bioengineering and environmental studies, and tinkered at Penn's Bio-MakerSpace.
Then 2020 happened. His mother, a nurse practitioner at New York Presbyterian, was on the front line of a pandemic and short on protective gear. He decided the more imminent threat wasn't decades away - it was now. In April 2020 he founded Pandemic Relief Supply, a scrappy operation that ended up delivering roughly $20 million in critical supplies to frontline workers.
The break that turned a relief effort into a company was almost comically specific: a cold call from a customer named Mike, asking for 1.5 million masks. To fill orders like that, Yancopoulos and his co-founders relocated to Los Angeles and started shaking hands with medical supply importers in person - the people who actually first bring product into the country.
That fieldwork became the map. By June 2021, Pandemic Relief Supply had matured into Grapevine Technologies, built around a hard-won understanding of where the supply chain hides its waste. He'd been carrying a notebook of ideas since freshman year, started the day he first heard about Penn's President's Innovation Prize. In 2022, one of those ideas won it.
At some point, it became clear to me that there are some rules worth following and some that need to be broken.
Ask Yancopoulos to explain the problem and he reaches for the humblest object in the building: a box of nitrile exam gloves. Through a traditional distributor, that box might run about $15. Routed through Grapevine, closer to $2. Multiply that gap across every consumable in a health system and you arrive at his headline claim - savings that, in some categories, reach as high as 84% versus the old way.
The savings aren't magic. They come from cutting layers between the people who first bring supplies into the country and the clinics that need them, then letting software do the comparison shopping no human buyer has time for. Grapevine says it has trimmed ordering time by around 90% and, applied to its own operation, increased revenue by more than $20 million in a single year while cutting customer costs by up to half.
Founded in April. Delivers roughly $20M in critical supplies to frontline workers, including donations to the AFYA Foundation.
In June, the relief effort becomes Grapevine Technologies, co-founded with best friend William Danon.
Wins Penn's President's Innovation Prize, raises about $2M in early funding, and graduates - all in roughly the same season.
Launches the Grapevine Vendor Network in January and moves the team to agile development.
Reports helping customers including The Oncology Institute save millions on healthcare supplies.
Since freshman year he's kept a running notebook of ideas - started the day he learned a Penn prize existed for the best of them. One eventually won it.
He came to college to fight climate change. He left fighting a pandemic, deciding the urgent thing in front of him deserved his attention first.
He met William Danon, his partner in Grapevine, through Danon's roommate sophomore year. A history major and a bioengineer, running a supply-chain company together.
To learn the supply chain, he flew to LA and met importers face to face. The trust he built there became the data map Grapevine runs on.
The cancer line isn't a throwaway. He frames technology as something that should align people around health, not replace them or chase scale blindly.
A nurse practitioner short on PPE didn't just inspire a company - she's the reason the whole thing is pointed at the people doing the caring.
"Bend technology toward human health - not to replace people, but to align us."
"Change is obvious - it does not mean people are ready for change."
"There are some rules worth following and some that need to be broken."
The aim isn't a better store. It's no store at all - and the best price anyway.
Built from public interviews, Penn coverage, and Grapevine's own materials. Figures are as reported by Grapevine and may vary by product, volume, and time.