Governor Pritzker called it the “Wild West”: the state-against-state scramble early in the pandemic to secure personal protective equipment for health care workers. Enter Cooper, a Northwestern University–trained neuroscientist and entrepreneur who’d gotten pretty good at finding surplus medical equipment while doing research as a doctoral candidate. In May, his startup, a web-based B2B marketplace that specializes in sourcing unused supplies and equipment, made the news when it partnered with the City of Chicago to connect local nonprofits and businesses to trusted PPE sources. Soon after, Rheaply developed a partnership with Northwestern to help source pandemic medical supplies and clinched a deal with the Defense Logistics Agency to streamline the deployment of military equipment across federal agencies.