Lab operations · Scientific procurement

HappiLabs

A Chicago service that put PhD scientists to work negotiating lab supply prices for other scientists, built on $20,000 from friends and family in 2012 and acquired by Science Exchange in March 2025.

Ten dollars for a price sheet

Tom Ruginis had been a pharmacology PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, then a salesman for a scientific distributor, and in that second job he noticed something that stuck with him: labs three floors apart in the same building were paying wildly different prices for the same gloves and beakers. “I went to this one lab that I knew was paying too much,” he told TechCrunch in 2018. “I had data showing that a lab three floors up in their building was paying almost half the price. I went straight to [the lab] and showed [them] this. I asked ‘would you give me $10 for this info and if I kept bringing you more pricing info?’ They gave me $10 and in my head that was our first customer.”

That single transaction, in his own telling, was the start of HappiLabs.

The problem: nowhere to shop around

Scientists in the United States spend more than $30 billion a year on lab supplies and equipment, according to figures Ruginis has cited, and the sellers on the other side of that spending include some of the largest life science companies in the world. “The profit margin for lab supplies is extraordinarily large,” Ruginis told TechCrunch. “Scientists don’t know that, and even if they know that it’s really hard for them to shop around. There’s nowhere for them to go.” A lab manager can normally catch that, but Ruginis and his co-founder argued that roughly 60% of a lab manager’s job, the purchasing, price comparison, negotiating and paperwork, can be done remotely with a phone and an internet connection. HappiLabs sold that 60% as a service.

A dropout, his girlfriend and a pamphlet

Ruginis left his PhD program in 2012. He was backed, he has said, by one of the few people who supported the decision at the time: his girlfriend, later wife, Rachel Ruginis, who has a background in graphic design. Together they built small price comparison pamphlets, styled like Consumer Reports for gloves and beakers, and Tom used his sales contacts to gather the underlying pricing data. He also took a coding class at Starter League inside Chicago’s 1871 tech hub, hoping to turn the pamphlet into a searchable website, then concluded that building a database and site of that size would take a full engineering team he did not have. The pamphlet idea, and then the website idea, both stalled. What survived was the service: PhD level virtual lab managers doing the purchasing work directly. Rachel has never called herself a co-founder, but Tom credits her with helping pay his rent in the early years and calls her one all the same.

The company launched in 2012 on $20,000 raised from friends and family, according to Ruginis’ account to TechCrunch. In a separate interview with Voyage Chicago that same year, the figure given for the friends and family round was $48,000, all of it given, Ruginis said, “with the expectation that they will lose their money.” The two accounts do not agree on the amount.

Bootstrapped for six years, then Y Combinator

HappiLabs grew slowly and, by its own account, deliberately without outside money. By 2018 the company said it had been hired by 40 labs and had created 12 jobs; TechCrunch, reporting a few months earlier in the same year, put the number at 26 labs and 14 employees, six of them PhD virtual lab managers. The company said it earned $1 million in revenue in 2017. In the summer of 2018, HappiLabs joined Y Combinator’s S18 batch and took its first institutional money: $120,000 from Y Combinator, per TechCrunch’s reporting at the time. Later trackers list the total differently. Tracxn records $150,000 raised in a single round; PitchBook records $168,000 in total funding across what it counts as six financing events and names Matter, the Chicago healthcare incubator, alongside Y Combinator as an investor. No SEC Form D filing under the HappiLabs name turns up in EDGAR, consistent with a company that funded itself through a YC SAFE and friends and family notes rather than a registered Regulation D offering.

Acquired by Science Exchange

On March 31, 2025, Science Exchange, a Palo Alto based procurement and supplier management SaaS company backed by the private equity firm Waud Capital Partners, announced it had acquired HappiLabs. The release described HappiLabs as bringing “deep expertise in sourcing specialized lab consumables” to Science Exchange’s platform, and said HappiLabs’ team would stay in place to serve existing customers. Ruginis took what the release called “a senior leadership role at Science Exchange, focusing on expanding procurement solutions for biotech companies.” Neither company disclosed the price. Science Exchange has since folded the Virtual Lab Manager name and product directly into its own site, offered to both large pharma and, as the newer pitch to smaller companies puts it, teams “running discovery and preclinical programs without dedicated procurement staff.”

What is proven, and what is still claimed

The customer testimonials and satisfaction numbers are HappiLabs’ own, not independently audited. What outside sources agree on is the shape of the story: a bootstrapped Chicago service that stayed small and self-funded for six years, took one round of outside money from Y Combinator in 2018, and was folded into a larger, private equity backed platform company in 2025. The dollar figures around both the friends and family round and the Y Combinator check differ depending on which account or tracker is consulted, and no SEC Form D exists to resolve either one.

What to watch

• Whether Science Exchange keeps the HappiLabs brand or the Virtual Lab Manager name only, since its site now runs under Science Exchange branding.
• Tom Ruginis’ role at Science Exchange and whether he stays past an integration period.
• Any disclosure of deal terms, which neither company has published.
• Independently reported customer results now that Virtual Lab Manager sits inside a larger, better funded platform.

In their words

Related companies

• Science Exchange: Shared investor: Waud Capital Partners. A marketplace for ordering experiments that became procurement software for big pharma, and that sourced the laboratories for the largest public test of whether
• HistoWiz: Also in Healthcare Services. A Brooklyn histology lab that turned its own order book into a searchable archive of digital slides
• Serif Health: Also in Healthcare Services. A company whose whole product is the cleanup of two federal disclosure rules
• Experiment: Also in Healthcare Services. A crowdfunding site where a graduate student can raise three thousand dollars in a month instead of waiting a year for a grant

Sources

1. IndependentY Combinator invests in HappiLabs to help scientists shop smarterTechCrunch, Sarah Wells · Aug 14, 2018
2. IndependentMeet Tom and Rachel Ruginis of HappiLabs in West LoopVoyage Chicago · Jan 9, 2018
3. IndependentHappiLabs company profileTracxn · accessed Sep 25, 2026
4. IndependentHappiLabs company profilePitchBook · accessed Sep 25, 2026
5. IndependentHappiLabs company page, S18 batch listingYCDB, The Y Combinator Database · accessed Sep 25, 2026
6. CompanyScience Exchange Acquires HappiLabs to Expand Scientific Procurement CapabilitiesBusiness Wire · Mar 31, 2025
7. CompanyScience Exchange acquires HappiLabs to expand scientific procurement capabilitiesScience Exchange press release · Mar 31, 2025
8. CompanyHappiLabs: Virtual Lab Managers for scientists and biotech, research LabsY Combinator company page · accessed Sep 25, 2026
9. CompanyHAPPI SCIENTISTS homepage with customer testimonialshappilabs.org, archived · Sep 10, 2018
10. CompanyVirtual Lab Manager solutions pageScience Exchange, happilabs.org · accessed Sep 15, 2026
11. IndependentTom Ruginis is the CEO of HappiLabs, creator of the Virtual Lab ManagerPerlara team page · archived Sep 1, 2016