#StartupsEverywhere: Julia Somerdin, Co-Founder & CEO, Labby
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Reliable, daily testing for dairy farmers
Julia Somerdin is the founder and inventor of Labby, a Rochester-based startup providing diagnostic hardware and software for dairy farmers to improve the quality of their herds’ milk. We sat down with Julia to talk about her company, how she has benefited from government grants supporting innovation, the impact of tariffs on American tech companies, and more.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Labby?
I’ve been in the telecom industry for 20 years. My undergraduate degree was EE (electronics engineering), and a high-tech MBA degree and in 2013, I got admitted into MIT to pursue a master degree in System Design Management, a degree designed for senior technical professionals. In 2017 Labby was founded with a mission to help the agriculture with the latest technology. I spent a few months talking to different kinds of farmers and doing additional research. What I learned was that analytics are never immediately available in livestock housing, so I set out to create a mobile lab in the palm of farmers’ hands.
What is the work you all are doing at Labby?
The dairy industry is an $800 billion market. Real-time milk testing has been a dream for dairy farmers for decades because they get paid by the volume and the quality of their product. Determining the quality of the milk at the source saves farmers time and money. Labby builds hardware and software for on-site, daily testing on the quality of the milk produced by each individual cow in a herd. Before technology like ours at Labby, farmers would have to pay off-site technicians to collect samples from the farm and go back to their lab for analysis, and that caused a delay, leading to infrequent rather than daily testing. Consistent, high-quality dairy yields are not only important to a farmer’s bottom line, they are also, more importantly, tied to the physical health of the consumers. Big data and the ability to process it quickly and accurately have had a transformative positive effect on human health, and with our transformative technologies, we will be able to provide visibility in animal health and milk quality health, ultimately improving human health and protect food supply.
What has been your experience in accessing government grants?
We’ve been very lucky with government grants. In total, we’ve received over $1.5 million in funding from a combination of federal and state grants. Labby has been a recipient of Phase I and Phase II National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation grants. We also got a grant from the New York state government through the Empire State Development Fund. We’ve been doing this for about six years, and the financial support we received from the state and federal governments allowed us to take our time and build a high-quality, innovative product. With an extra push, Labby will be profitable within the next year.
How have recent tariff actions affected the production of Labby’s hardware?
All of the tariff actions are adding significant uncertainty for businesses. While the final devices are assembled in the United States, those parts are sourced from overseas, mainly from China. The first issue is that we don’t know where else to buy those parts from; China is the sole manufacturer of a lot of pieces of our technology. The second issue is that tariffs raise our costs, which means we have to raise our prices in order to make ourselves profitable, and then that puts a higher cost on the dairy farmers.
As much as we’ve received support from the government, they’re also taking money out of their own pockets. This technology was built with government dollars, and now, instead of spending that money solely on building the best product possible, we have to divert more of our capital to our standard purchases.
Have you or your customers encountered any connectivity issues while working in rural areas?
Yes. A lot of farmers have access to the Internet today, but it’s often not stable and reliable. We often have had to put our own hot spots on our customers’ farms, so broadband development in rural America is crucial for technology and innovation adoption. I'll say that about half of the farms we work on have good coverage, but the other half need better Internet, like fiber. Lack of Internet is a big challenge in the tech space because if you’re building or using any type of technology today, it depends on not just the Internet, but high-speed and reliable Internet. Rural connectivity is critical to future innovation.
What are your goals for Labby moving forward?
I would like Labby to be invited to the next Conference of the Parties (COP)--the meeting of the governing body for the UN’s policies on climate change. We represent a small minority of voices sitting at the intersection of nutrition science, technology, and social perception. I would like to give those intersections a stronger voice on the international stage. Also, as I said before, I plan to make Labby profitable within the next year. Finally, I want to help highlight the nutritional benefits of cow milk. There's been a big increase in the variety of alternative milks, but some of these options are highly processed and provide little to no additional nutritional value. I want Labby to provide clearer answers to complicated questions.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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