§ 03 — Portfolio index
Parallel Quarterly ·
No. 17
17
Lab
Pre-seed
2023
Active
Founded in
Madison, Wisconsin
Founders
Sana Qureshi, Eddie Lindqvist
Sector
Lab
First check
Pre-seed
Year
2023
Status
Active
Counting colonies on an agar plate is the kind of job that is given to the newest person in the lab. It takes minutes per plate, a hundred plates a day, and the result changes with the counter’s mood. Agarwork builds a bench camera and a counting program that does the same job in seconds.
Sana Qureshi was a microbiologist who had counted her share of plates. Eddie Lindqvist was an imaging engineer in a semiconductor plant. The device lights the plate evenly, counts, and flags the plates it is unsure of for a human to check. It has no demo mode. It has a log, and the log shows which plates it got wrong.
Agarwork is used in 68 labs, mostly in food safety, water testing and teaching hospitals. A lab usually starts with one unit. It saves a technician about two hours a day, and in most labs the first thing they do with the time is more testing.
Why we invested
Hana watched a technician work around a feature the founders were proud of, and the founders rebuilt it in three weeks. That is the quality we back. The product is better each time we visit.