We’re thrilled to announce that High Alpha has led Rheaply’s Series A financing and we’re lucky to be joined by a great group of investors, including 100 Black Angels & Allies Fund, Concrete Rose Capital, Hyde Park Angels, M25, MCJ Collective, Morgan Stanley Multicultural Innovation Lab, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, and Salesforce Ventures.
I wanted to first share a quick story about Rheaply’s origin because it’s worth sharing and provides a glimpse into what kind of entrepreneur Garry Cooper is.
You wouldn’t expect Garry to conceive of the idea for a circular economy B2B company while studying for a PhD in Neuroscience. However, Garry noticed during lab work that research departments would discard important research assets that could be reused and were sorely needed in other labs.
Some departments had a surplus of materials and would discard the excess assets that were perfectly appropriate for reuse. Other departments were using outdated spreadsheets and incomplete listservs to source needed materials from peers. Due to a lack of asset location and quantity knowledge, though, they often purchased new ones instead.
As the best entrepreneurs always do, Garry came to realize there had to be a better way.
Garry began wheeling around a cart of unused supplies for labs to share resources. It worked. Researchers began checking the cart before ordering new supplies. Garry maintained the cart until he graduated and left to join a consulting firm.
Researchers in the lab were still reaching out to Garry long after he left campus asking about ‘the cart’. The lightbulb went off that this is a big problem worth solving in a major way. Thus Rheaply was born.
Rheaply’s platform, Asset Exchange Manager (AxM)™, makes it easy and efficient for organizations in technology, government, retail, healthcare, and higher education to track and utilize the assets they already have before making a purchasing decision. The platform enables companies to share and sell physical assets within and between organizations.
In the U.S. economy, over $630B of physical workplace assets sit idle every year. Not knowing what assets exist and/or the location, frequently leads to inefficiencies in procurement practices, the inability to properly track and manage asset depreciation, and the purchase of duplicate assets, significantly impacting every organization’s bottom line. If never put to use, these assets will add over 60M tons of waste to landfills.
To date, Rheaply has helped organizations divert over 14.5 metric tons of waste and produce $1.6M in cost savings over 5,000 transactions. The company also recently partnered with the City of Chicago and World Business Chicago to address critical PPE shortages among the small business community during the COVID-19 pandemic. And they’re just getting started.
We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Garry and the entire Rheaply team to the High Alpha family.
