It is 11:47 on a Tuesday in a wet lab somewhere outside Boston. A postdoc opens her laptop, types a CAS number, and clicks. The reagent is in her cart, the PI approves it on her phone twenty minutes later, and the box lands on the bench by Thursday. No fax. No purchase order tucked inside a binder. No three-way email about whether anyone has seen the missing pipette tips. The whole thing happens inside a browser tab called Quartzy.
Most science gets stuck somewhere between the experiment and the storeroom. Quartzy has spent fifteen years quietly unsticking it.
01 / WHO THEY ARE NOWThe browser tab in 13,000 labs
Quartzy is, depending on which tab you have open, two things. It is a lab management platform - inventory, requests, approvals, order tracking, the unglamorous accounting that keeps science moving. It is also a marketplace. The Quartzy Shop holds more than three million life-science products from over a thousand suppliers, with consolidated billing and free shipping for the kind of customers who buy nitrile gloves by the pallet.
The company says roughly 200,000 scientists across 13,000 labs use it. That puts Quartzy somewhere between Slack and a chemical supply catalog, which is a category most software people have never had to think about. The labs notice. The procurement officers notice. The investors, slowly, have started to notice too.
02 / THE PROBLEMScience has a paperwork problem
Lab research is supposed to be the bleeding edge. In practice it is also a small business that runs on spreadsheets. Researchers spend somewhere around twenty percent of their time on procurement, inventory, and the gentle internal diplomacy required to find a missing reagent. That is one full day a week that nobody set out to spend on logistics.
For decades the answer was a binder. Then it was an Excel sheet stored on a shared drive that one grad student edited and three people quietly broke. Vendor catalogs were paper, then PDFs, then websites that did not talk to each other. Each lab had its own informal system, which is another way of saying no system at all.
There is an irony here. The same labs running multi-million-dollar sequencers were tracking their consumables the way a small bakery tracks flour. Discovering CRISPR did not exempt anyone from filling out a requisition form.
03 / THE FOUNDERS' BETTwo PhDs who never finished
Jayant Kulkarni and Adam Regelmann met as biology PhD students at Columbia. They had each, independently, become the de facto inventory manager of their lab. Not because they wanted to. Because the alternative was running an experiment without knowing if the antibody was already in the freezer.
The bet was simple and a little impertinent. Most lab software at the time was sold to administrators - heavy, expensive, designed for compliance officers rather than the person actually holding the pipette. Kulkarni and Regelmann pointed the product the other way. Build something a postdoc would log into voluntarily. Make it free. Worry about how to charge later.
They got into Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch. A seed round followed. Then Series A, Series B, and the slow, patient work of selling software to a profession that distrusts software vendors for excellent historical reasons.
Quartzy, in seven moments
04 / THE PRODUCTA boring miracle
The Quartzy software is, on its face, unremarkable. There is a list of items in your freezer. There is a request workflow that ends with someone clicking approve. There is an order tracker that tells you when the FedEx truck is supposed to show up. None of it would impress a designer at a consumer app studio.
That is precisely the point. The software is built to disappear into the rhythm of lab work. You do not think about Quartzy the way you think about a feature. You think about it the way you think about the lights being on. The Shop sits behind the same login - search a product, drop it in a request, watch it move through approvals and into the building. The whole supply chain, compressed into a few clicks that a tired postdoc can execute at midnight.
Where lab time goes
05 / THE PROOF13,000 labs is a lot of labs
Numbers in B2B software get inflated easily, so a few that hold up to scrutiny. Quartzy reports roughly 200,000 scientist users across 13,000 labs. The Shop has more than three million SKUs - more than most general-purpose e-commerce sites carry, in a vertical most general-purpose e-commerce sites would not know how to taxonomize. More than a thousand suppliers route orders through the platform.
Total capital raised across the company's life sits around $74 million. The latest round, a $23M venture infusion in April 2026, is being pointed at the marketplace and the API connectors that let large biotech customers wire Quartzy into their ERP. The growth is not the kind that produces magazine covers. It is the kind that quietly compounds in customer renewals.
06 / THE MISSIONGive scientists their day back
Kulkarni has said, in various ways over the years, that the mission is to free researchers from administrative work so they can do research. This is the kind of sentence companies print on careers pages, and usually it means nothing. In Quartzy's case there is an audit trail. The product is free. The marketplace makes money so the software does not have to. The incentive is to make scientists more productive, because more productive scientists buy more reagents.
It is a tidy alignment. The grad student gets their evening back. The PI gets a real-time view of the lab's spend. The supplier gets a centralized channel. The investors get a marketplace that grows whenever science does.
07 / WHY IT MATTERS TOMORROWBiotech runs on its supply chain
The next decade of biology is going to involve a lot more labs. Cell therapy startups. Synthetic biology platforms. AI-driven discovery shops that need to run wet lab validation at speeds the old purchasing systems were never designed to handle. Every one of those labs will need a system to track what is in the freezer and a way to buy more of it without losing a week.
That is the surface area Quartzy is sitting on. Not glamorous. Not a chatbot. Just the unsexy infrastructure that the entire industry quietly depends on, getting deeper and more integrated each quarter.
Back to that postdoc outside Boston. Her reagent arrives Thursday morning. She runs the experiment by lunch. The data is in the lab notebook by the end of the day. She did not think about Quartzy once during the experiment. That is what the founders were building. A piece of software you do not have to notice. A storeroom that audits itself. A bench day that ends at five.
The freezer is organized. The science can carry on.