By Scott Meacham
The story of MaxQ is an adventure story of entrepreneurship.
This is an exciting time to be an entrepreneur in Oklahoma. Our state recently celebrated our first unicorn, proof-positive that what happens in Silicon Valley and the environs of MIT in Boston can also happen here.
In the last few months, i2E and iMCI have invested $840,000 in concept- and growth-stage startups that have the potential to become our region’s next superstars.
We made our fourth investment in MaxQ Research, a Stillwater firm that creates validated cold chain packaging and compliance automation solutions for the life sciences industry. We are lead investor in this $1.9 million round; we also led the three preceding funding events in MaxQ. Other major investors include SeedStep Angels, Square Deal Ventures, CloudLeaf, and other investors from Oklahoma and the West Coast.
Students launched venture
Our history with MaxQ began when they competed in the 2012 Governor’s Cup (now the Love’s Entrepreneur’s Cup), Oklahoma’s statewide collegiate business plan competition. At the time, CEO Saravan Kumar and COO Balaji Jayakumar, were graduate students conducting research and completing their Ph.D. degrees in biomedical engineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering at Oklahoma State University (OSU). CFO Shoaib Shaikh had recently graduated with an MBA from OSU. They were determined to change the way temperature-sensitive biologics could be shipped.
“The three of us were friends. We started doing this is my apartment,” Kumar said. “The first box, we used our oven to bake it. We had a vision of playing some kind of a role in assuring temperature compliance in the blood supply chain, and today we are working with all of the major donor blood centers. It has been so humbling to watch our products positively impact every leg of the blood supply chain.”
The story of MaxQ is an adventure story of entrepreneurship.
Those three students testing advanced materials in Kumar’s oven are still friends and partners. Today the company they are building has more than 35 employees. MaxQ’s packaging systems are especially designed to hold and transfer refrigerated, controlled room temperature or frozen biological materials, such as red blood cells, whole blood, platelets, or plasma, as well as tissue specimens, cell and gene therapy materials and transplant organs.
From 2017, MaxQ’s customer base grew from 18 hospitals to more than 700 hospitals in the United States and overseas. Then COVID-19 hit. MaxQ made hard decisions to streamline operations, including across the board salary cuts. The whole team stuck together — not one person left — and pivoted.
“We found an opportunity in the COVID-19 vaccine space,” Kumar said. “We were one of the first ones to design and launch an exclusive CDC-compliant system with integrated monitoring capabilities for last mile transportation of vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J.”
Resilient venture
MaxQ Research weathered the pandemic. The company has doubled revenue and sales, already exceeding 2020 revenues with several major new contracts and a new innovation, the MaxTrace solution.
“We designed and developed MaxTrace over the last year,” said Kumar. “With MaxTrace, you can achieve a fully automated cold chain. This predictive cloud engine provides real-time actionable Insights about the thermal life of your shippers. Now you can anticipate what could go wrong and — before things spiral out of control — you can initiate the best preventative action.”
This information gives shippers the opportunity to react as high-value shipments are in transit, rather than discovering the out of temperature condition at the final destination when it is too late.
MaxQ plans to deploy the capital from this latest round to support scaling operations, sales and business development activities.
“We are doing this because we want to save lives,” Kumar said. “Four years ago, it was boxes for blood transport, now we are looking into the future of providing predictive intelligence to mitigate risk and ensure safe delivery of life saving biologics. Oklahoma investors have been phenomenal to work with. They have been supportive of us from day one.”
MaxQ truly is an adventure story in entrepreneurship.
Scott Meacham CEO of i2E Inc., a nonprofit corporation that mentors many of the state’s technology-based startup companies. i2E receives state support from the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology and is an integral part of Oklahoma’s Innovation Model. Contact Meacham at i2E_Comments@i2E.org.
