Rheaply

Rheaply, Inc. is a privately held business-to-business software-as-a-service company based in Chicago, Illinois, that builds enterprise asset management technology for the circular economy. Its platform, delivered as a progressive web application, is used to inventory physical assets, enable internal reuse and redeployment across teams and sites, and manage end-of-life disposition through sale or donation. Core product areas marketed on the company site are inventory management, internal reuse, sustainable disposition and decommissions, supported by approval workflows, searchable asset records, audit trails, and reporting on cost savings, diverted waste and avoided carbon.

The company began as a peer-to-peer marketplace for laboratory equipment and consumables in higher education, where researchers could list unneeded resources and connect with nearby departments and labs, and later extended the same resource-exchange model to other sectors. Rheaply says it serves higher education, government, enterprise, biopharma, built-environment and retail organizations, and adds consulting services to help clients design circularity and end-of-life programs. In 2022 it launched an embodied carbon avoidance tool so customers could quantify the environmental impact of resource exchange. Services are described as enterprise asset management, asset recovery and reverse logistics.

Reported customers and users include Northwestern University, MIT, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Barnard College, RUSH University Medical Center, Allina Health, Google, Exelon and AbbVie, alongside state and local government partners. The company reported 53 employees.

Founding story

Rheaply's name is a portmanteau of "research" and "cheaply." It originated in a laboratory setting, created to connect scientists holding excess resources with those needing them at a time when research faced funding cuts while usable lab equipment and consumables were being discarded. Wikipedia states the company was founded by Garry Cooper, Peter Tucker and Tyler Skelton in Chicago in 2015; the company's own about page states it was built in 2016 by Dr. Garry Cooper.

Business model

Rheaply sells subscription access to its asset-exchange and asset-management platform to organizations, using a sliding subscription and freemium model in which users can post surplus items and browse supplies, many free or heavily discounted. It supplements software with a circular consulting offering, project-based decommission services and a partner/ecosystem program that connects clients to buyers, nonprofits and reuse partners.

Subscription software fees on a sliding scale with a freemium tier, plus consulting engagements and project-based decommissioning and disposition services.

Traction

The company reports more than one million items posted, thousands of ecosystem partners including a network of more than 3,400 partners for decommissions and 3,000+ verified receiving organizations, and cumulative impact figures covering landfill diversion, avoided procurement spend, donated value and avoided carbon. Published case studies cite a university saving $530,000 through reuse, Allina Health saving more than $193,000, a public research university posting $170,000 in surplus value and reusing over $30,000 of furniture in 14 days, furniture lead times cut from 16 weeks to 2-3 days at a large technology client, and retail fixture-sharing lead times cut from 18-22 weeks to 1-2 weeks.

Latest developments

Recent company posts describe a partnership with Catalyst by Wellstar to advance circular innovation in health systems, recognition as a Cradle to Cradle Circularity Education Partner, the launch of the BMEx Marketplace for building material excess on Vancouver Island, Canada, a $5.6M award by Michigan's EGLE toward building a circular supply chain, and work on disaster debris management.