A scientist can know exactly what an experiment is meant to answer and still spend the afternoon trying to buy what it requires. There are catalogs to search, specifications to compare, suppliers to consult, purchasing rules to satisfy. The order eventually goes through. The afternoon is less easily recovered. Siamak Baharloo has built much of his working life around this unglamorous interval. A doctorate in genetics led him into the business of scientific products; years inside that business led him to co-found Labviva. His subject is the awkward distance between knowing what you want to do and getting hold of the things that let you do it.
Procurement seldom gets the flattering lighting. In Baharloo’s account of his early career, however, the purchasing problem began with scientific judgment: researchers needed help identifying materials that suited their methods. They consulted colleagues, read manuals and searched databases. Useful advice could shorten that work. The question he kept returning to was how to make such advice part of the everyday buying process.
A scientist learns to read a catalog
Baharloo trained at the University of California, San Francisco, earning a PhD in genetics. His subsequent career took him through the supplier side of scientific work, with digital marketing and commerce responsibilities at companies including Life Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific, MilliporeSigma and Sartorius. It was an education in a second kind of complexity: how a technically demanding audience finds, evaluates and purchases a product.
By February 2009, he was identified as Millipore’s director of eBusiness when the company introduced an interactive tool connecting its products with scientific pathway information. The idea was already recognizable: put a product into a useful scientific setting. A catalog number tells you which item is for sale. A researcher has further questions.
There is another trace of that interest in a patent application filed in 2011 and published the following year. Baharloo is named among the inventors of E-Commerce Systems and Methods, assigned to Life Technologies. Its subject includes selling products in relation to protocols and workflows, alongside related and substitute items. Long before Labviva’s launch, he was working on the relationship between an online order and the work surrounding it.
At Sartorius, an October 2014 announcement identified him as head of global eBusiness. The company was adopting software to manage product information and media assets, with a connection to its existing enterprise system. Baharloo emphasized consistency across the web, mobile devices, purchasing platforms and print. The same product had to make sense wherever a customer encountered it. That is a wonderfully prosaic ambition. Anyone who has compared contradictory specifications can appreciate its romance.
A colleague before a co-founder
One of the useful details in Baharloo’s story belongs to someone else’s recollection. Nicholas Rioux, later Labviva’s co-founder and chief technology officer, has credited Baharloo with giving him an earlier opportunity: hiring him into his department to run technical strategy for a global conglomerate. Their working relationship preceded the startup. Before there was a shared company, there had been a decision to entrust someone with a job.
That history gives the partnership a texture a list of titles cannot supply. Rioux describes opportunities from other people as central to his own career. Baharloo appears in that account as someone who offered one. It is a small, concrete glimpse of how professional connections can become part of a company’s foundations.
Labviva’s own account dates its founding to 2017 and names three co-founders: Baharloo, Rioux and Aaron Miramontes. The combination brought together experience in scientific commerce, technology and product development. Baharloo arrived with years spent close to both researchers and the organizations selling to them. Starting a company gave that experience a different outlet.
Half a million products, one recurring question
Labviva announced its public marketplace launch in December 2018. The initial description included more than 500,000 products from hundreds of manufacturers and suppliers, with products grouped around applications and protocols. Its promise depended on a connection Baharloo had been pursuing for years: scientific information should help a buyer decide what belongs in the basket.
“Labviva places science at the heart of the purchasing process”
Siamak Baharloo · December 2018
The phrase is easier to understand when you think about the buyer’s competing responsibilities. The scientist needs an item suited to the work. The purchasing team needs an acceptable supplier, a price and the right approvals. A useful system has to accommodate both. Otherwise, someone ends up translating between an experiment and an order form, with several browser tabs for company.
At MIT’s 2019 Platform Strategy Summit, Baharloo discussed the barriers separating established organizations in scientific research. He described a marketplace that could work across those boundaries and give smaller manufacturers access to large buyers. His ambition extended beyond the transaction: the interface could become a place to investigate products and connect with other participants. Shopping was one activity within a broader exchange of information.
That was a founder explaining a market he had already spent years inhabiting. The value he saw lay partly in the relationships an interface could make possible. A small supplier’s useful product still needs a route into a large organization’s purchasing environment. Being good at making something and being easy to buy from are separate accomplishments.
The company needs a bigger room
In 2021, Labviva announced an $8 million seed round and opened a Boston headquarters on Canal Street. Its team already worked across the continental United States. The headquarters announcement paired the office with new hires in customer service, delivery, operations and business development. Building procurement software was also becoming the work of building an organization around it.
Two years later, the office was getting tight. In March 2023, Baharloo described plans to move to a nearby Causeway Street space roughly five times larger. He told Built In that the company intended to grow its 40-person team to 70 that year. These were plans, with all the practical work plans require. The furniture was about to have a more demanding job.
That month, Labviva announced a $20 million Series A led by Biospring Partners. Jennifer Lum joined the board. The financing supported wider deployment, additional products and international expansion. The company’s description of its work remained specific: bring product discovery and purchasing together while connecting with the systems customers already used.
after its $25m Series B
Year-over-year growth reported in January 2025. Historical company figures.
The January 2025 Series B brought another $25 million, led by 53 Stations, with Jason Pritzker joining the board. Labviva said revenue had doubled and platform transactions had tripled over the preceding year. Those figures describe a particular period. They also explain the next set of demands on Baharloo: more product development, more customer support and a business operating across more places.
Who gets onto the purchasing screen?
Access has remained a recurring concern in Baharloo’s explanation of the business. In 2025, he described configurable supplier badges and search refinements that let organizations act on their own purchasing priorities. A buyer might want to find a local supplier, a small business or a seller meeting particular environmental criteria. Those intentions become more useful when the purchasing interface makes them possible to carry out.
His writing on laboratory sustainability takes the same concern into everyday operations. Broader supplier networks and digital purchasing tools can help organizations make more deliberate decisions about what they order. There is a practical connection between knowing what is available and avoiding unnecessary purchases. Environmental ambitions eventually meet a shelf, a delivery and a decision about quantities.
In May 2025, Labviva announced an international headquarters in London and appointed Carlo Iannicola general manager of Europe. The expansion brought the company’s attention to local support and customers operating across different markets. Geography adds its own requirements. A purchasing process that works across borders still has to be useful to the person ordering at a particular location.
For Baharloo, the international plan followed the customer relationships. He had described product development as work done in close partnership with customers, with their needs shaping new features. It is a less theatrical account of invention than the sudden flash. It also leaves room for the inconvenient detail that a customer, rather than a founder, may have spotted the next useful thing.
“Listen to customers. Don't dismiss seemingly minor insights.”
Siamak Baharloo · August 2024
The vocabulary changes. The question stays.
By June 2026, Labviva’s technical language had moved to an “Agentic Crew”: specialized small language models coordinated by a larger model. The architecture assigned different work to purchasing, sourcing, compliance and domain specialists. Its announcement also described analytics and inventory agents, explicitly marking those two as still in development and unavailable for commercial purchase at launch.
The continuity with Baharloo’s earlier work is the attention to context. A system helping with a scientific purchase has to understand more than the words in a request. It needs information about products and the rules governing an order. The new architecture proposed dividing that work among specialists, with actions logged for review.
Across his career, the recurring object has been the researcher trying to make a choice. The product catalog, the purchasing interface and the company supporting them have changed. The test remains human-sized: can someone get the right information and make a useful decision without surrendering so much time to the process?
Baharloo’s story is full of product data, integrations and purchase orders. It also contains an earlier job offered to a future co-founder, offices outgrown and a persistent interest in what customers have noticed. The administrative details have people inside them. Somewhere, a scientist would quite like to get back to the experiment.
Follow the work
Interviews, writing and a recorded summit conversation.