R-Zero, a biosafety technology company dedicated to reducing the spread of infectious disease, on June 16 announced a $41.5 million Series B investment to accelerate the development and deployment of the company's continuous, automated disinfection ecosystem, designed to quickly establish a new standard for post-pandemic human health and safety in public spaces.
The funding round was led by World Innovation Lab (WiL) with participation from venture capital icon John Doerr and current R-Zero investors, DBL Partners and SOSV / HAX. This latest investment brings R-Zero’s total capital raised to over $58 million in the few short months since the company was founded in early 2020, it notes, further establishing the company among the global leaders in delivering innovative biosafety technologies to address gaps in society’s health protections against COVID-19 and other common infectious diseases.
“Disinfection - one of the few industries that’s been untouched by technology - has been long overdue for disruption,” commented Rob Theis, General Partner at WiL, who has joined R-Zero’s board of directors as part of the funding round.
Theis added, “The rapid adoption of R-Zero’s UV-C technology demonstrates clear demand across the mass market and public sector for more effective, efficient, and sustainable methods of ensuring health security across indoor environments. The physical spaces of tomorrow will be protected by a network of connected smart devices, powered by data insights, and R-Zero is leading the way in the emerging intelligent disinfection market.”R-Zero notes this latest financing round comes when businesses are making critical decisions about how to reopen and stay open, navigating what workplace changes in the workplace need to be made to ensure employee safety. As cited by the company, according to a recent Harris Poll survey of U.S. office workers, 91% of employees believe employers are responsible for ensuring employee health and safety in the workplace. "This powerful expectation is paving the way for R-Zero’s innovation and technology that better addresses how organizations safeguard human health, now and into the future," contends the company.
“As a society, we have failed at ensuring safety in the indoor spaces where we spend over 90% of our lives,” said Grant Morgan, co-founder and CEO of R-Zero.
Morgan continued, “Over the last century, we’ve seen the advent of the internet, autonomous vehicles, and we’ve sent humans to space. Yet today, we’re still disinfecting with the same harmful chemicals we used during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic to fight pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 in 2021. The future is about measuring and managing disinfection with the same level of sophistication and technology that is standard for other industries. We are proud to be the first to employ data science, advanced AI and ML techniques, modern software, and IoT technology to create and maintain healthier indoor environments. This latest investment enables us to accelerate our product innovation and help even more organizations prioritize and protect the health of the people they serve, and ultimately make sick days a relic of the past.”
R-Zero was founded in the early stages of the pandemic, "upon recognizing an opportunity to revolutionize the antiquated, $20+ billion disinfection industry and establish a new standard for how organizations improve employee and patron safety by creating healthier indoor environments," the company said.
R-Zero’s first product, an IoT-enabled whole room UV-C disinfection system, currently protects thousands of schools, senior care facilities, commercial office spaces, professional sports facilities and event spaces, correctional facilities, health clinics, restaurants, gyms, and more to destroy pathogens in minutes - without the use of chemicals. R-Zero says its sustainable disinfection technology successfully reduces organizations’ disinfection carbon footprint by 93%, generates over 250x less waste, and reduces risk by more than 15x compared to traditional chemical disinfection methods.
Ira Ehrenpreis, Managing Partner at DBL Partners and an R-Zero board member, commented, “This past year underscored the need to disrupt a legacy disinfection industry that is inefficient, unsustainable, dangerous, and manual. Instead, the future needs to focus on science-based approaches utilizing technology and innovation that give customers new ways to effectively, safely, and sustainably disinfect the places we all work, learn, and play. In building this category-defining company, R-Zero embodies DBL’s double bottom line approach: the company democratizes access to a suite of best-in-class disinfection products that are not only better for people and the planet, but are also affordable, enabling customers to manage this critical part of their business in ways that were previously unimaginable.”
R-Zero says its unprecedented growth over the past year "highlights a critical reality about the post-pandemic era: The public now possesses a powerful, new awareness of the impact indoor environments have on their overall health. Moving forward, there will be a premium on the health security of indoor spaces, and society will make decisions about where to work, learn, and where to spend their time and money based on how organizations are addressing human health and safety," concluded the company's statement.
For more information, visit www.rzero.com.
