SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--R-Zero, a biosafety company dedicated to developing the most effective hospital-grade technologies to reduce the spread of infectious disease, is moving into 2021 as the enterprise UV-C technology leader with its runaway 2020 growth. Within three months of operationalizing, the company has booked more than $5M in sales, and emerged as a preferred market solution for a variety of businesses and sectors. Customers include a coalition of state-level education associations supporting 90 schools and 60,000 students across America, Michelin star restaurants, banks and financial services, independent hoteliers, county Sheriff’s departments and corrections facilities, private practice medical offices and surgical centers, as well as professional sports teams (including the NBA, NFL, and MLS).
“Enterprise startups typically don’t reach $5M in bookings during their first year, let alone during their first quarter of sales,” said Ben Boyer, co-founder and Executive Chairman of R-Zero. “The fact we did so with a hardware product makes this an even bigger accomplishment. We believe we’re on a top-decile growth path, and looking at our future product roadmap, we’re confident R-Zero’s best days are still ahead.”
More customers are onboarding every day as they understand the improved efficiency and effectiveness that R-Zero’s UV-C device brings to their toolbox of resources to help combat surface and airborne pathogens associated with COVID, the seasonal flu and other infectious viruses. To date, various schools and businesses have reported zero to significantly reduced COVID transmission since implementing the new system and realize how this will continue to benefit them even after the immediate threat of the pandemic is over.
The company founders, CEO Grant Morgan and President Eli Harris, told Forbes today about how they applied their past experience in medical device product management and disaster response technology to innovate an outdated legacy industry. Until now, critical public health tools like hospital-grade UVC technology were only accessible to large hospitals with huge budgets or customers with deep pockets, leaving small businesses without the badly needed tools to recover from the economic depression caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In the beginning, we were going to bootstrap the business and almost formed an LLC, but the deeper we dove in, the more we realized that there was an opportunity to innovate the disinfection industry with intelligent software and sophisticated analytics platforms,” said Harris. “Our position as a startup allowed us to test and iterate a product that could hone in on the unique challenges we faced at the onset of the coronavirus. We asked ourselves: what should the disinfection industry look like? We brought in modern tools like data science, AI and machine learning to modernize a disinfection protocol that hadn’t seen much of an update since the 1960s.”
R-Zero’s findings led them to develop their flagship product, Arc, a germicidal UV-C device proven to destroy 99.99% of airborne and surface pathogens, without the use of harmful chemicals. The unit’s high-intensity UV light quickly and effectively inactivates infectious viruses, bacteria and more, in under seven minutes. R-Zero’s device is the fastest UV-C disinfection solution on the market, and is the first hospital-grade germicidal UV system financially and operationally accessible to the mass market, with a hardware-as-a-service model that allows businesses to lease the device for an affordable price.
UV-C is a common disinfection solution and has been industry-standard in hospitals and medical care facilities for over a century; commercial UV-C solutions were mostly limited to the healthcare market largely due to prohibitive costs, with comparable solutions starting at $120,000.
“The future of R-Zero is about establishing a new standard in biosafety so we can rebuild and maintain trust in common public spaces - during and post-pandemic,” says Morgan. “We’re not only helping our customers reduce reliance on toxic cleaning agents, we’re also educating them on their exposure to health risk and supporting efficient and intelligent disinfection. We believe that a healthier humanity by virtue of more biosecure spaces is something that we can all get behind. In the coming years, you’ll be able to recognize if a space is clean by looking for the R-Zero Badge when you visit your favorite businesses.”
Businesses interested in more information about R-Zero can learn more at http://www.rzero.com.
About R-Zero
R-Zero is the first biosafety company dedicated to making the spaces we all live, learn, work, and play safer and clinically clean. Founded to help organizations protect what matters most, R-Zero’s suite of thoughtfully designed, hospital-grade technologies and science-backed protocols reduces the transmission of pathogens and the diseases they cause - from the coronavirus to the common cold. R-Zero’s flagship product, Arc, is a touchless, hospital-grade UV-C disinfection device, designed to be operationally and financially accessible to organizations of all shapes and sizes. BLE and LTE-M connectivity shares usage data in real-time, providing organizations with an auditable trail of all disinfection activities for the first time. Results from recent (CDC and EPA recognized) independent lab tests prove Arc’s hospital-grade efficacy, successfully destroying over 99.99% of surface and airborne pathogens (including human coronavirus and norovirus) in a 1,000 sq ft space, in just 7 minutes. R-Zero is backed by leading venture capital firms, as well as thought-leaders from the health, hospitality, sports, commercial real estate, impact, and other industries. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, visit www.rzero.com.
