AN IRISH company that helps scientists find relevant materials suppliers is expanding its team and beginning a pilot of its service after securing a six-figure investment.

Scrazzl aims to provide interactive information on materials referenced in research papers, which will help scientists identify the most popular and relevant options.

“All of these products are recorded in the materials section of a research paper but there was nothing to help scientists see how good they were or what to buy, no Trip Advisor-type resource,” said David Kavanagh, chief executive and co-founder of Scrazzl.

“But if you could release and extract some of that by doing a count of how many times different products were being used, it would provide a proxy measurement and also show you what works.”

Mr Kavanagh said the idea developed from conversations with Desmond O’Shea, the company’s other founder. They saw that while many scientists looked at other research papers for guidance on materials, it was difficult to get an idea of what was most commonly used.

They developed Scrazzl, which automatically collates materials information from multiple research papers, to solve this.

Scrazzl sits in the browser and offers an interactive layer of detail about a material, including how many and and in which other papers it was referenced.

From there the company moved to the National Digital Research Centre’s Launchpad programme in January.

Its recent investment came from Tillmann Ziegert and Mark Long, both formerly of leading antibody supplier Abcam.

The founders quickly saw that the need for their service went beyond scientists too; materials suppliers and publishers were also trying to find new ways to remain relevant in a changing market.

“We quickly discovered there was a real need from the companies that make these products as they were finding it hard to market these products in a way that was engaging,” Mr Kavanagh said.

“Publishers right now are interested in making their content more discoverable too . . . we hit them at a time when the market is ripe for disruption.”

The information Scrazzl collates also allows them to offer other services. One is an programme that pulls research citations through to suppliers’ websites to show where their product has been used. Mr Kavanagh said this had previously been a manual job but they could now do it automatically.

The third service is a business intelligence offering which uses the data to identify trends for customers.