Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Aaron Miramontes, Co-Founder & CEO at Labviva:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: Labviva is SaaS platform that supports purchasing in the field of life sciences. It was founded in 2017 by me and other industry veterans, Siamak Barharloo (CEO) and Nicholas Rioux (CIO). The product itself integrates with enterprise procurement applications like SAP Ariba, Oracle Procurement Cloud, and JAGGEAR to provide a better purchasing experience for researchers. Labviva’s customers are research universities, pharmaceutical companies, and biotechnology firms.
It’s different than other offerings in the market in that the product supports the priorities of scientists by mapping products like reagents, chemicals, and instrumentation to scientific applications, techniques, and protocols. It also collects citations from peer reviewed journals and related documents, so that researchers can easily understand use cases.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: Labviva was excited to announce an $8 million USD series seed capital raise. This is our second major funding round, and investors placed a strong valuation on the company because of the ability to penetrate large some of the most well-known pharma, biotech, and research organizations in North America.
The funding will be used for further development of the platform with new product lines, including investment in operations and customer success platforms. In addition, we’re staffing up. Project managers, SCRUM masters, developers, and engineers who are interested in working out of our Boston office should check out labviva.com/jobs
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Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: Labviva is part of an emerging class of applications called enterprise gateway marketplaces (EGMs). EGMs are commercial marketplaces that facilitate commerce between suppliers and purchasers; often a marketplace platform powered by an EGM will look and function similarly to a consumer ecommerce site, even though it is operating in a business context.
What’s important about this model is that for scientists and researchers, it provides an experience that is similar to a site like Amazon in that it has a sophisticated understand of search queries, and can recommend equal, functional, or exact match products. This has been extremely critical during the pandemic, when shortages of common supplies had laboratories looking for new or different vendors than they usually worked with. At the same time, since an EGM like Labviva sits on top of existing purchasing software, even when users are buying outside of their regular patterns, the platform can ensure that compliance with purchasing rules is maintained.
Q: What can we expect from your company in next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: As mentioned about, we are hiring and expanding. What we’ll really be looking at is scaling up our workforce and keeping a focus on our culture, which is very collaborative. As founders, we’ve all worn a lot of hats, which isn’t unusual at a start-up, but we’ll also be looking to refine roles so that we can position for increased growth.
We’ll also remain focused on customer acquisition, so look for announcements as we add logos.
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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: The technology itself is not only exciting, it’s also very practical, but I think one of the best things about Labviva is how are able to accelerate the pace of research. The products purchased through the platform aren’t retail therapy, but are rather being used to develop new therapies that help improve people’s lives.
