Garry Cooper Jr.

Last updated
Garry Cooper, Jr.
Education Indiana University Bloomington (BS), Northwestern University (Ph.D.)
Occupation(s)CEO, Rheaply

Garry Cooper Jr. is an American entrepreneur, scientist, and business leader. He currently serves as the CEO of Rheaply, an enterprise asset management company for the circular economy, which he co-founded in 2015. [1] He is also a founding member of LongJump, a venture capital firm dedicated to funding underrepresented founders. [2]

Contents

Early life and education

Cooper attended Stivers School for the Arts in Dayton, Ohio, where he focused on mathematics and violin, and graduated in 2002. [3] He then attended Indiana University Bloomington, where he graduated in 2007 with a BS in mathematics and a BA in chemistry. [4]

After graduating from college, Cooper enrolled in graduate school at Northwestern University, where he studied neuroscience with a focus on Parkinson's disease. He earned his doctorate in 2014, as well as a Certificate in Management from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management in 2012. [5]

Career

External videos
Nuvola apps kaboodle.svg "How to Make Sure Materials Get Reused -- Again and Again: Garry Cooper", July 26, 2023, TED Talks

While pursuing his PhD at Northwestern, Cooper realized that many labs and departments were throwing away research assets — the same equipment and consumables that were needed in one lab would sit unused in another. In an effort to solve this problem, Cooper co-founded Rheaply in 2015 in Chicago, along with Peter Tucker and Tyler Skelton. The name is a portmanteau of "research" and "cheaply", [6] and the company started out as a peer-to-peer, virtual marketplace for laboratory equipment and consumables within higher education. Over time, Rheaply has grown to use circular economy principles and technology to bring better efficiencies to resource recovery and reuse within and across all types of organizations — from federal, state, and local governments, to commercial enterprise.

Since its founding, Rheaply has raised numerous rounds of funding, including a $2.5M seed round in 2020, an $8M Series A in 2021, [7] a $2.2M InterSeries round in June 2021, and a $20M raise in 2022. [8] The company also won Revolution's Rise of the Rest Equity Edition in 2020, and has been selected to multiple cohorts, including the initial cohort for 1871's Advanced Member Program, the 2019 MIT Solve Class, [9] and the Goldman Sachs 2021 Launch With GS Cohort. [10]

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring of 2020, Cooper joined Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot to announce the Chicago PPE Market, a partnership between Rheaply and the City of Chicago to help small businesses and nonprofits obtain protective equipment for their employees. [11]

In March of 2021, Cooper and a group of fellow Chicago startup founders launched LongJump, a first check venture fund designed to invest in local underrepresented founders. [12] Cooper is also a board member of P33 Chicago, [13] an initiative designed to drive Chicago's tech growth, and 1871, a tech innovation hub named after the year of the Great Chicago Fire. [14] In 2021 he was selected by Mayor Lightfoot to assist in the city's "Come Back to Move Forward" campaign, designed to bring tech talent back to Chicago. [15]

In relation to his neuroscience work, Cooper remains an adjunct assistant professor at Northwestern, focused on Parkinson's disease research. [16] He is also a former board member of the American Parkinson's Disease Association. [17]

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo-founder. During the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Venture capital</span> Form of private-equity financing

Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are usually from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Pincus</span> American Internet entrepreneur

Mark Jonathan Pincus is an American Internet entrepreneur known as the founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company. Pincus also founded the startups Freeloader, Inc., Tribe Networks, and Support.com. Pincus served as the CEO of Zynga until July 2013, then again from 2015 to 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Y Combinator</span> American startup accelerator

Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Calacanis</span> American businessman

Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chuck Templeton</span> American Internet entrepreneur (born 1968)

Chuck Templeton is an American Internet entrepreneur, best known as the founder and former CEO of OpenTable, which went public in May 2009 and was acquired by The Priceline Group in June 2014. He is currently a Managing Director of S2G Ventures, an investment fund focused on healthy food and sustainable agriculture, Investment Committee Member at Impact Engine, a Chicago-based social and environmental impact investment fund, and serves on the boards of several other Internet start-ups.

Harvard Innovation Labs (i-Lab) is an institution which aims to promote team-based and entrepreneurial activities among Harvard students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and members of the Allston and Greater Boston communities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alejandro Cremades</span>

Alejandro Cremades is a Spanish author and entrepreneur based in New York City.

Onevest, a New York–based investment crowdfunding site for startups that was acquired by Business Rockstars in April 2018, allowed entrepreneurs to raise capital from accredited investors. In July 2014, startups launching on Onevest had collectively raised over $66 million.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conquest BITS Pilani</span>

Conquest, an initiative by students at the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus is India's first Student-Run Startup Accelerator. Their program includes online mentoring to the ten most exciting startups from across the country over six weeks, connecting them with field experts. Following this, the startups undergo a ten-day mentorship program in Bangalore. The program ends with the Grand Finale where these startups pitch before India's biggest investment firms and media houses.

Chris Gladwin is an American inventor, computer engineer and technology entrepreneur, who has founded or co-founded a series of tech-related companies including MusicNow, Cleversafe and Ocient.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chukwuemeka Fred Agbata</span> Nigerian technology entrepreneur and TV presenter (born 1979)

Chukwuemeka Fred Agbata Jnr. also known as CFA is a Nigerian journalist and a former television presenter at Channels TV. He is into digital marketing and known as a technology entrepreneur with focus on business coaching and public speaking. He hosted the first virtual telehealth conference of Nigeria’s telemedicine company, CareClick with the theme ‘The Future Of Healthcare Today’ on 24 September 2020. He was involved in various ICT-related companies that contributed to the development of the Founder Institute. He is known as the founder of Pacer Venture and has links with Climate Action Africa. He is the MD/CEO of Anambra State ICT Agency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator</span> NYC technology startup seed accelerator

Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator is an American seed accelerator launched in January 2011.

Rheaply, Inc. is a privately held B2B Software as a service company that specializes in enterprise asset management technology for the circular economy. The company markets resource exchange technology to improve asset recovery outcomes and internal reuse of physical assets within large organizations. Rheaply operates a progressive web application for resource management in higher education, government, enterprise, biopharma, built environment and retail organizations. The company is located in Chicago, Illinois.

Angela Essien is a Nigerian technology entrepreneur. She is co-founder of Schoolable, an edutech platform for education financing in Africa.

Berkeley SkyDeck (SkyDeck) is a high-tech entrepreneurship startup accelerator and incubator program at the University of California, Berkeley serving as a joint venture between the Haas School of Business and Berkeley College of Engineering. Founded in 2012, SkyDeck promotes high-tech entrepreneurship in the Silicon Valley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Impact X</span> British venture capital firm

Impact X Capital is a venture capital firm which looks to invest in underrepresented entrepreneurs from across Europe. Impact X Capital was started by Eric Collins. Its initial founding members include Ursula Burns, Ric Lewis and Lenny Henry.

Clustermarket is a lab management system which helps laboratories to optimize operations and accelerate their results.

Cyclotron Road is a fellowship program for technology innovators at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, or Berkeley Lab. Cyclotron Road supports entrepreneurial scientists as they advance their own technology projects that have the promise of significant global impact. The core support for the program comes from the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, through the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program. Most of the technologies developed by Cyclotron Road fellows are designed to accelerate the transition to a decarbonized economy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SepPure Technologies</span> Membrane Technology

SepPure Technologies is a Membrane Technology company based in Singapore and Canada. The company focuses on chemical-resistant hollow fibre membranes for Organic Solvent Nanofiltration (OSN) solutions designed to separate chemical mixtures at the molecular level with minimal energy use. With its technology, SepPure aims to address the significant energy expenditure associated with industrial-scale chemical separation processes across various sectors such as vegetable oil, pharmaceutical, semiconductor, petrochemical, and further oil industries, which currently accounts for up to 15% of the world's total energy consumption.

References

  1. ↑ "Rheaply Overview". Pitchbook. August 20, 2021.
  2. ↑ Davis, Katherine (March 4, 2021). "Report: Chicago VC firm LongJump is 'catalyzing a whole new generation' of founders and investors". The Business Journals. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  3. ↑ "Alumni Spotlight Round Up - James Auwarter (2002), Coran Henley (2005), and Gary Cooper (2002)". Stivers School for the Arts Alumni Connection. March 19, 2013. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  4. ↑ "Garry Cooper, JR". LinkedIn. August 20, 2021.
  5. ↑ "Garry Cooper, Co-Founder and CEO at Rheaply". Startups for Good. 2021-06-14. Retrieved 2021-08-23.
  6. ↑ Dolgin, Elie (February 7, 2018). "How going green can raise cash for your lab". Nature. 554 (7691): 265–267. Bibcode:2018Natur.554..265D. doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-01601-5 .
  7. ↑ "High Alpha Leads $8M Series A for Rheaply". High Alpha. February 16, 2021. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  8. ↑ Freedman, Andrew (2022-06-07). "Circular economy startup Rheaply raises $20 million from high-profile investors". Axios. Retrieved 2022-07-05.
  9. ↑ "Rheaply". MIT Solve. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  10. ↑ "Rheaply Chosen to Participate in Goldman Sachs' 2021 Launch With GS Entrepreneur Cohort". MIT Solve. June 21, 2021. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  11. ↑ "Mayor Lightfoot and Local Industry Working Groups Release Industry Guidelines for Phase Three Reopening in Chicago". City of Chicago. May 26, 2020. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  12. ↑ Glover, Ellen (March 4, 2021). "This New VC Firm Wants to Diversify Chicago's Startup Ecosystem for Good". Built in Chicago. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  13. ↑ "Who we are". P33. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  14. ↑ Zomorodi, Manoush; Delahoussaye, James; Meshkinpour, Sanaz (2023-09-08). "Reusing chairs, bricks, even lab equipment by building a circular economy". NPR - TED Radio Hour. Retrieved 2023-09-25.
  15. ↑ Quig, A.D. (July 8, 2021). "Here's what Lightfoot's been up to in the Bay Area". Chicago Business. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  16. ↑ "Garry Cooper JR, Ph.D." Northwestern University. August 20, 2021.
  17. ↑ "Garry Cooper". US Chamber of Commerce Foundation. 28 June 2019. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  18. ↑ "Garry Cooper". Chicago Business. 8 October 2020. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  19. ↑ "Garry Cooper". Forbes. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  20. ↑ Feifer, Jason (July 7, 2020). "How going green can raise cash for your lab". Entrepreneur. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  21. ↑ "21. Garry Cooper". Chicago Magazine. Retrieved 2021-08-23.
  22. ↑ "LinkedIn Top Voices in the Green Economy: The 15 creators to follow in the U.S. and Canada". www.linkedin.com. Retrieved 2022-07-05.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.