Biotech is certainly exciting on the cost front as technology progresses, however, there is an even easier win which is bringing price transparency to supplies and reagents.
We've worked with every YC biotech company (except Ginkgo) and the savings is massive verse paying list price. Startups are unable to negotiate competitive prices from large distributors due to their limit budgets so we've been pooling their purchasing power.
Recently, we've started doing analytics (http://labspend.com/) for labs on supplies/chemicals and see huge differences even in universities that spend 10+ million per a year.
Here is an example from four universities located in the midwest of the USA for a commonly used chemical reagent called acetonitrile.
Interesting! So are store.p212121.com or lapspend.com aka offers.p212121.com hooked to the same backend? Can I buy from labspend.com? Since universities buy through their labs do they see divergent prices even within the same institution? How do you provide cheaper prices - do you buy in bulk and then redistribute or do you simply get lower prices bc you move large volumes via pooling? I think you are onto something really cool here. I imagine a future where perhaps Stanford would do all their buying through you since you could pool the volume of multiple large research institutions. Btw how do you process payments? Also the more info boxes on labspend.com don't seem to be working.
We started by offering an e-commerce solution although we are adding products like crazy there's 30+ million chemicals/products in science. This is another reason we built out labspend which has a different backend. We are seeing labs paying different amounts at the same school. Stanford we are able to find 10-20% savings at times, but there are in a good place compared to start ups.
Sorry about the Lean More buttons not working and will get those up to date soon. Feel free to shoot me email if you have a specific question (sean@p212121.com).
We've worked with every YC biotech company (except Ginkgo) and the savings is massive verse paying list price. Startups are unable to negotiate competitive prices from large distributors due to their limit budgets so we've been pooling their purchasing power.
Recently, we've started doing analytics (http://labspend.com/) for labs on supplies/chemicals and see huge differences even in universities that spend 10+ million per a year.
Here is an example from four universities located in the midwest of the USA for a commonly used chemical reagent called acetonitrile.
List price for this item is currently at $1335.49 (http://www1.fishersci.com/ecomm/servlet/fsproductdetail_1065...) and here is what university labs are paying $399.31, $239.16, $220.54, $156.10 - image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7671582/chemical-pricing... ).
We commonly see 10x savings, but even in this example 5x can be quite significant in the budget of a start up.