Lab Sensor Solutions

Jari Bolander and four co-founders—Jeff, Daniel, Marv, and Bill—had all worked together at various startups before, including one venture attempting to track every blood tube on the planet. When that didn't pan out, they stayed connected and spotted an opportunity: precious clinical samples were getting lost or spoiling during transport from remote collection sites to central labs. Labs were literally throwing blood samples into igloo coolers filled with ice and driving them in Toyota Corollas and pickup trucks down dirt roads. The team realized there had to be a better way to track and protect these samples.

The founders split equity equally—a rare move Jari emphasized as the only fair approach since all five were equal partners with vesting schedules over four years. They raised a $420k friends-and-family seed round and spent two years building their platform. The solution combined hardware sensors, a mobile app, and a cloud SaaS backend to monitor temperature and location in real-time. The gross margins exceeded 85% because customers didn't own the hardware—they rented sensors on a monthly subscription basis for $25 per sensor. This asset-light approach gave them flexibility while providing customers with a complete, robust platform.

After graduating from 500 Startups Batch 14 and launching sales in January-February 2014, Jari and the team employed high-touch, enterprise sales tactics. They picked up the phone and called clinical laboratories and hospitals directly. By the time of this interview, they had three paying customers with 125 sensors deployed across them, generating roughly $3,000 per month in revenue. They also had seven labs in trials (hardware trials, since labs wanted to test before committing) and 22 more qualified prospects in their immediate pipeline. The trials represented approximately 1,700 additional sensors once converted.

Jari noted the healthcare industry still relied heavily on fax machines and preferred high-touch relationships—a far cry from fast-moving SaaS. What worked was timing. The Affordable Care Act was forcing a major disruption: labs were shifting from volume-based to value-based compensation models. The old system paid labs regardless of sample quality; the new system wouldn't. This regulatory tailwind made quality and accuracy critical selling points. Since 70% of medical diagnoses depend on lab tests, Lab Sensor Solutions addressed a real pain point. The team focused ruthlessly using lessons from 500 Startups and frameworks like *The Pumpkin Plan* to prioritize the right customers and opportunities.

With three initial customers, seven in trials, and 22 in the pipeline, Lab Sensor Solutions had found product-market fit in a traditionally slow-moving industry. The hardware component and subscription model allowed them to scale without being as capital-intensive as semiconductor manufacturing but more defensible than pure SaaS. Jari, 44 and married, continued building the company through grit and hard work—attributes he stressed young entrepreneurs shouldn't underestimate when considering entrepreneurship.