Building Science Exchange: a biotech marketplace founder's journey

Executive overview

Scientific research outsourcing was massively fragmented — finding, contracting, and managing external labs involved months of effort, opaque pricing, and no quality assurance. Elizabeth Iorns solved this by building a curated B2B marketplace that handles qualification, contracts, and project management in one platform.

Science Exchange targets the pharmaceutical industry's $100B+ annual outsourced research spend. Product-market fit arrived when Amgen adopted the platform for all discovery research — replacing internal SharePoint processes with automated vendor management and spend intelligence.

Structured marketplaces with pre-qualified supply and transparent performance data outcompete entrenched internal workflows.

From academic lab to marketplace startup

• Experienced fragmentation firsthand as a breast cancer researcher needing microarray analysis from external labs
• Price differences of up to 10x for equivalent experiments due to lack of market information
• University tech transfer was not an obstacle — the University of Miami office simply said "go do whatever you want"
• Found YC through a Wired Magazine article; applied as total outsiders with no network connections
• Added a technical co-founder within two weeks after Alexis Ohanian warned the application would fail without one
• Launched transactions off-platform during YC to prove both supply and demand before the product was built

Building a two-sided B2B marketplace

• Supply was easier: providers already wanted more clients and benefited from instant access to all Science Exchange buyers
• Demand was harder: convincing large, conservative pharma companies to replace entrenched internal processes took years
• The MVP had to become a curated marketplace — providers pre-qualified, contracts standardised, deliverables scoped up front
• True product-market fit: Amgen deployed Science Exchange across all discovery research, replacing a manual SharePoint workflow
• Real competitor is still the status quo — elaborate internal SharePoint setups that teams are reluctant to abandon
• Net Promoter Score of 78 (buyers) and 67 (suppliers) versus industry average of zero; structured expectations drive better supplier performance

The reproducibility initiative as a strategic inflection point

• Decision to replicate published scientific results was non-obvious and went against the focus principle
• Ran via the Science Exchange network — finding labs with matching assays, animal models, and instruments instantly
• Controversial because failed replication is culturally conflated with fraud; most published results are not reproducible
• Key finding: pharmaceutical-style assay transfer (with SOPs, positive/negative controls, variability checks) works; academic practice lacks this rigour
• Public replication studies (Cancer Biology Reproducibility Project, Prostate Cancer Foundation) changed Science Exchange's brand and opened pharmaceutical partnership doors
• The initiative proved the platform's breadth and directly drove the enterprise deals that followed

Running a marketplace at scale

• Now 85 people managing several large pharmaceutical integrations simultaneously
• Scaling challenge: executing tight integration deadlines without over-committing or missing adjacent opportunities
• Hired a CFO at growth stage — adds institutional credibility as well as financial rigour
• Core CEO skill: identifying personal weaknesses early and hiring to fill them rather than learning everything yourself
• Business fundamentals are learnable; common sense covers most of it

Advice for biotech founders

• Do the killer experiment early — the one that definitively answers whether the science works; founders delay it because failure ends the company, but early failure preserves capital for something else
• Best time to join YC: after generating substantial R&D from grant funding, so you're in development not research mode
• Tech transfer is a real obstacle for spinning out university IP, though some institutions are improving
• Avoid structures where a famous PI holds a large founder stake purely for legitimacy — fix the cap table before it compounds
• PhD founders should be the actual entrepreneurs, not figureheads; the analogy is software developers becoming startup founders rather than deferring to executives

The biotech startup wave

• Access to capital is unprecedented; new therapeutic modalities (gene therapy, cell therapy, RNAi) have opened viable paths that didn't exist previously
• Industry veterans with drug-development experience are now founding five-person startups — a new phenomenon
• Lab-as-a-service infrastructure (Lab Central, QB3 bench rental) is reducing barriers to entry
• Productised regulatory expertise (e.g. Enzyme, funded by YC) is replacing $100k+ consultant engagements
• Rare disease focus enables small companies to reach approval and build their own sales force — previously impossible
• Non-scientist founders can succeed by developing deep domain knowledge and a credible personal motivation; Notable Labs is the cited example

Biotech vs. software

• Software allows continuous pivoting toward product-market fit; biotech cannot change the underlying science
• Biotech milestones are binary risk-reduction events on a fixed development path toward clinical proof
• There is no biotech MVP in the traditional sense — commercial revenue requires an approved, marketed product
• Most biotechs exit via partnership or acquisition in early clinical development rather than full commercialisation
• People, culture, and focus principles transfer directly from software to biotech; only the domain mechanics differ