Enterprise Investing With Local Impact

On Thursday, March 24, as a part of New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week (NOEW) 2022, Ochsner Ventures, a department of Ochsner Health, introduced the Greater New Orleans’ entrepreneurial community to a public conversation on “Enterprise Investing with Local Impact.”

As part of this discussion, they invited both Laurel Hess, Founder & CEO, hampr and Trivia Frazier, PhD, President & CEO, Obatala Science as well as their partner investors Mike Katz, Managing Director, Benson Capital Partners to discuss how to create successful startup partnerships and how investing locally is a win-win for all.

“We are looking for companies and founders who can help us move the ball with something important to our business,” said Aimee Quirk, CEO of Ochsner Ventures. “Ochsner has stepped up to be a catalyst to transform health outcomes in our state and investing locally is one piece of that puzzle.”

Read on to learn more about two leading enterprises that are building critical businesses in Louisiana, hand in hand with local investors and partners:

hampr

hampr founder and working mom, Laurel Hess, recalls being fed up spending her weekends washing her kids’ clothes, frustrated that doing laundry wasn’t as simple as ordering online groceries online. That’s when an idea sparked and hampr was born. Hess thought that a peer-to-peer marketplace for doing laundry would yield benefits for both the person with the laundry and the person doing the washing. hampr offers an expedited, on-demand laundry service to its customers while also offering ‘washrs’ an opportunity to make supplemental income. ‘Washers’ pick up laundry directly from your doorstep, wash it according to your preferences, and return it neatly folded the following day.

Since their launch in 2020, hampr has expanded from Lafayette, LA across 8 states and earned the support of investors such as Techstars, Ochsner Ventures, and Benson Capital. Mike Katz, of Benson Capital, reflected on working with Laurel to develop her business saying, “the first time I brought up hampr to our investors, they literally fell out of their chairs. But after doing the numbers we showed that the data is actually really compelling.” And that analysis has certainly held true. 

hampr has been a hit amongst young families and busy professionals, helping to offload a weekly chore and constant source of stress. “We are hoping to scale into more of a household management category in the next couple years. Everything we do over the next two years is about scale and growth. We are looking to get into 125 markets,” Hess proclaimed to a crowded room at New Orleans Entrepreneur Week 2022.

Obatala Sciences

Obatala Sciences is committed to creating more accurate models of human tissue starting with the cells. Their vision is to enable faster and safer delivery of innovative therapies that improve quality of life for all patients regardless of ethic backgrounds. The company is promoting diversity to advance the study and prevention of diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and cancer. This New Orleans biotech company offers research enabling products and brain power to scientists in industry and academia with the goal of advancing tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Thanks to Ochsner Ventures and partners, Obatala has received "a major financial investment" to help their work in providing pharmaceutical companies faster ways to move through the drug-testing cycle. Instead of an often laborious and multiyear process of progressing slowly from tests on cells to animals to humans, Obatala has developed a method to model fat outside of the body and use it to predict a human response. The technology, dubbed “fat-on-a-chip,” allows testing on a more diverse range of tissue, which makes the testing process speedier and cheaper.

“We're essentially making tissue models that represent patients of various demographics,” Frazier said during the NOEW 2022 panel. “The success of Obatala is very important to me,” said Frazier. “But Obatala’s success goes hand-in-hand with the success of the biotech ecosystem here in New Orleans and Louisiana.”

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Enterprise investing helps support jobs and the economy while helping local entrepreneurs, who are doing valuable work, by giving them access to customers and mentorship. 

Learn more about what Ochsner Ventures and the work they are doing by going to www.ochsner.org/ventures/.