Interactive materials marketplace helps engineers and resin suppliers connect

Inventables describes itself as an online platform that helps material and technology vendors market their products to individuals and companies seeking sourcing. Users include material suppliers like DuPont, 3M, and RTP, which create product pages housed on the site that describe the properties and applications of their materials. These product pages are then found by engineers, industrial designers, and product developers when they search the Internet for new materials and technologies. Kaplan estimates that half of the companies visitors are directed to the site from Google searches. Once on the site, each vendor's product page contains a button that can be used to contact them with questions, requests for quotes, or purchase samples. One key, according to Kaplan, is that anyone can browse the site and submit inquiries for free, and vendors can create product profiles and review the inquiries they receive for free. Vendors only pay Inventables if they choose to view the contact information of any individuals who have submitted an inquiry, with the lead's purchase price determined by a formula.

Kaplan says roughly 35,000 buyers visit the site per month, with nearly a half a million total visits over the course of a year. Since its inception, Kaplan says Inventables has seen 1000% growth in the total number of inquiries it receives. Marketplace is the third product or iteration of the original concept since the company's 2002 founding. It initially launched with Design Aid where subscribing companies were sent physical samples of materials. The next product, Innovation, was a more tailored, customer-specific version of that Design Aid service.

With this latest model, Kaplan hopes to alter how material suppliers and designers interact. "We're really creating the platform to get people communicating," Kaplan says. "We create a common language and increase the chance that the exchange will be worth [the users'] time." Headquartered in Chicago, the company has six employees, including software engineers for site development and a manager for the buyer and the vendor halves of the site. On April 8, 2009, the company secured $2 million in venture capital funding from San Francisco's True Ventures, a investment firm that targets internet businesses.

In the past, companies would subscribe to the Design Aid service and be sent various material samples and datasheets, with around 20 mailings every quarter. As time went on, Kaplan decided to post Inventables' wealth of data online and make it free. The company formerly acted as an editor of sorts, operating as a gatekeeper in terms of what was posted. Now the model is a self-building website, that gets smarter the more it's used, grouping like materials and requests, and suggesting other materials to users, including completely different materials or different versions of the same material.

"We're trying to design the site in a way that it gets smarter," Kaplan says. As a part of this, the company does continuous usability testing to make sure users' inquiries generate proper leads. There are terms of use for companies that attempt to post to the site and while Kaplan says Inventables doesn't seek to "police patents" it makes sure the site and the information it posts is consistent with the law.

A mechanical engineering graduate from the University of Illinois, Kaplan first encountered the world of material and design research at General Motors where he worked in the turbocharger group as an intern. While he was still a senior at Illinois, he also co-founded a custom software development company called Lever Works, which was sold in 2001 to Leo Media. The impetus for Inventables stemmed from Kaplan's frustration with the predominant means of material sourcing at the time. A designer interested in finding a specific material to solve an engineering problem could either flip through his or her Rolodex, polling various suppliers on what they offered, or the designer could wade through scattershot results from online search engines. "It's a lot of routing the right thing to the right person," Kaplan says. —Tony Deligio