Nick Rioux of Labviva shares how AI and automation are transforming life sciences procurement, boosting efficiency, choice, and supplier diversity.
Nick, you’ve been at the intersection of life sciences and digital innovation for years. What inspired you to merge your eCommerce expertise with scientific procurement through Labviva?
I started in pure B2C eCommerce as an individual developer, taking on contracts. I started my development career earlier than most, working professionally around 14-15 years old, taking on feature and system development for major companies as a consultant. I loved the work, but then I took a contract with a major life sciences company and was inspired to realize that I was not just selling products, but helping to support scientists and the scientific community. I did notice, though, that much of the technology that was supporting scientists was far behind the times in comparison to the B2C world. I wanted to change that and apply the techniques and technologies from my prior life into this space to help people.
The launch of Smart Suppliers of the Future is a major milestone. How does this initiative redefine how suppliers interact and compete in the life sciences marketplace?
The truth is that most management of B2B commerce is still very manual and not very data-driven. Life Sciences products have some of the most complex data requirements and the accuracy of information is essential for researchers and lab operations professionals making the right decisions. Many suppliers have challenges meeting the growing needs of multinational biotech and life sciences organizations due to out-of-date technologies and the difficulties of working with legacy technological infrastructure. Smart Suppliers of the Future states that we must invest in technology to remove manual processes, improve content, and enable companies to shine in the marketplace based on the products they sell and the contributions they can make, and not be limited by manual data curation and static catalog management.
Labviva is often described as driving the “Amazonification” of life sciences. What does that term mean to you, and how does it translate into real-world value for your users?
It means having choices and being able to act on those choices based upon your parameters and not technological limitations. Oftentimes, B2B buyers are purchasing from legacy suppliers due to technological or content barriers. For me, “Amazonification” is the removal of these barriers, allowing purchasing entities to engage with the suppliers of their choosing, compare products on the basis of objective criteria, and not be limited in their choices due to external factors.
With over 18,000 manufacturers and 15 million products on your platform, how do you maintain quality control and ensure a seamless experience for both suppliers and buyers?
This is a challenge. The answer is leveraging best-of-breed and future-looking technologies in natural language processing (NLP), data science, and machine learning. At Labviva, we have created a custom data supply chain that leverages all of these techniques into a highly automated technological process that can extract, clean, and enrich products with useful information at high rates of throughput, precision, and recall.
Supplier diversity is a key focus for Labviva. How is the platform enabling smaller or emerging suppliers to gain visibility in a space traditionally dominated by large players?
This is a great question. The ability to create good content for users and perform the technological integrations required to work with regulated major pharma, biotech, and research organizations requires quite a bit of capital that can be prohibitive to smaller organizations. Labviva helps level the playing field by enriching what we can offer organizations that cannot do this themselves. This might include calculating chemical identifiers and validating chemical hazard data. This also might include appending meta information on whether a product is environmentally friendly, or if a supplier is a small business or a local producer. By assisting with this content curation, not to mention technical integrations with customer procurement and ERP solutions, we can help many smaller businesses compete better in the marketplace.
The platform’s AI and analytics capabilities are clearly transformative. How are these technologies shaping smarter procurement decisions for research organizations?
We are utilizing our technology to enhance content, enabling scientists to make informed decisions about products and suppliers with less effort. We are applying our approaches to identify and correct data errors in content. We are now also taking steps to help users with their workloads by automating replenishment orders, helping to process and evaluate large, complex quote documents, and are looking to provide agent assistance for search applications to take the load off of individual procurement and lab operations professionals.
Many life sciences companies struggle with digital integration. What are the biggest barriers you see in modernizing procurement workflows, and how does Labviva address them?
The biggest barriers are overly complex legacy infrastructural footprints and governance/ownership barriers on how to improve that situation. Labviva helps because we sit at the intersection of “older enterprise technology” and “newer AI and web practices”. We fully understand how to deeply integrate into legacy procurement and ERP solutions and run at integrations that a lot of software providers run away from. That being said, our expertise and investments in AI technologies and modern web development approaches allow us to help work with customers to mature their technological footprints.
Sustainability and compliance are growing concerns in R&D procurement. How does Labviva’s technology support organizations striving to meet these evolving standards?
Labviva utilizes its data supply chain technology to provide key data points to help customers with sustainability and compliance goals. We can annotate chemicals with hazards and restrictions information. We can leverage this information in our IMS (Inventory Management System) to enable stockroom compliance and other processes. We can also provide information on the sustainability of products, in some cases partnering with other data providers and agencies, to help customers select products that meet their goals. All of this can also be aggregated and reported on via our analytics solutions from a number of perspectives.
From a technology leadership perspective, what trends in AI or data infrastructure excite you most for the future of digital procurement?
I am incredibly interested in agent technologies and Agentic AI. I see the future as us enabling simple repetitive tasks to be set aside and automated so that scientists and lab operations professionals can get back to higher-value work that supports research. While I remain focused on content enrichment and quality, as I see those as essential precursors to agent-based execution of standard procurement tasks, the methodologies have lowered the bar on how much content is needed for an agent to make a good decision, and this means utility can be extracted from the utilization of these emerging technologies with potentially less investment.
Looking ahead, how do you envision the next phase of Labviva’s journey as it continues to reshape the procurement ecosystem for scientists worldwide?
We will always remain focused on saving purchasing organizations time and money, increasing choices for researchers while saving them time, and helping suppliers do their best to meet customer requirements. That being said, we will be expanding into exciting areas, driving levels of content that have not been seen before in the industry, while leveraging agents and Agentic AI approaches to reach a new level of automation in procurement activities.
Nick Rioux
Co-Founder and CTO, Labviva
Nick is a life sciences technical leader with deep expertise in modern web development methodologies. He has decades of experience in technical implementations for biotechnology organizations, and brings a unique eCommerce approach to Labviva’s scientific shopping experience merging artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, learning algorithms and shopping optimization methods. He holds an MBA in Business and Information Systems from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, and is passionate about driving innovations through technology.
About Labviva
Labviva, the AI-powered life sciences procurement platform, has launched Smart Suppliers of the Future, a global initiative helping lab equipment suppliers digitalize catalogs and reach new customers. Expanding its network of 15 million products from 18,000 manufacturers, Labviva enhances supplier diversity and competitive pricing across Europe. Scientists and procurement teams gain instant access to a curated ecosystem, AI-powered insights, and automated inventory management, reducing R&D costs. Suppliers benefit from direct buyer access, creating a frictionless, compliant, and efficient life sciences supply chain.
