After Ali Safavi graduated with a university engineering degree, he began his career in the life science and health care industry where later, he said, a lightbulb moment would give him the idea to start his own company.
It happened while he was setting up an automation platform in a lab and noticed large quantities of plastic consumables in a nearby biohazard bin being discarded after only one use.
“I saw that as a problem, as an unsustainable practice. I couldn’t stop thinking there has to be a better way,” said Safavi, founder, president and CEO of Richmond biotech firm Grenova. “Why should plastics be thrown away especially if they’re the high-quality plastic being used within the industry? What if there was an automated system that could clean, sterilize and enable the industry to reuse?”
Safavi began researching automated systems that could clean, sterilize and enable reuse of these plastics. He quickly found such a system didn’t exist and in 2014 founded sustainable biotech firm Grenova, which means Green Innovation, to accomplish just that.
Grenova focused first on the most the commonly utilized plastic consumable labs use — pipette tips. Its technology washes and sterilizes, allowing the devices used in diagnostic testing to be reused, rather than thrown away.
“Change that is consistent and moving toward something better for the future is the only way for us to be able survive as mankind on this planet,” Safavi said.
The goal, he said, is to make the industry look at plastic consumables as reusable instead of disposable, so that the practice becomes standard.
“We now have more than 300 labs using our products, and each of these labs have multiple branches, so thousands of labs throughout the globe use our system,” he said. “We still have a lot more opportunities to grow.”
And Grenova plans to do just that with its recent move to a larger facility in Scott’s Addition.
“It’s an exciting time for Grenova,” Safavi said. “We are about to expand our production by more than 10 times and meet the market demand. We will have that capacity in this new facility.”
The move includes expanding and scaling product line and adding new team members. The expanded product line includes Automated TipNovus and Purus, which removes chemical and biological contaminants from lab well plates.
Safavi said before Grenova was launched, some in the life science and healthcare industry were concerned about the possibility of contamination residue. Grenova was able to gain their trust through results, which he said speak for themselves.
“I put the first prototype in the lab, and it passed the test. They saw matching results between using sample results from the brand-new tips vs. the tips that had been washed and reused [by Grenova],” he said. “The lab asked for a second unit, so that’s when I knew there was an opportunity for a business.”
