GARRY COOPER WASN'T supposed to be an entrepreneur. After completing a PhD in neuroscience in 2014, he was working at Northwestern University's medical school when he learned that some of his colleagues needed equipment that was lying unused in his lab. He began distributing the supplies, pushing a cart around the medical school, eventually earning the nickname the Cart Guy.
"I was just trying to share resources with people who needed them within the university," Cooper says. He did more than that. Cooper's idea ultimately grew into a circular economy business to allow organizations to sell, rent, or donate physical assets they no longer need.
By 2016, Cooper, who was then 33 years old, had co-founded Chicago-based Rheaply, a resources exchange platform to help companies manage their purchased goods and cut carbon emissions.
Rheaply's addressable market wasn't exactly small. An estimated $600 billion of surplus assets sit idle in American companies today, equal to the economies of 44 U.S. states, according to Cooper: "There's literally an economy on its own of the things we're not using in corporate America." In 2020, Cooper landed a $1 million investment by winning a pitch contest hosted by Revolution, AOL co-founder Steve Case's Washington, D.C.-based investment firm. The contest provided funding for Black and Brown founders outside of Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York City, and the winners got an investment from Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. Since 2014, that campaign has backed 200 startups in 100 U.S. cities in an effort to spread entrepreneurship beyond the coasts.
"It's about trying to level the playing field and help more people in more places start to scale companies, pursue the American dream, and create jobs that lift up those communities," says Case, 64.
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