Back in May 2014, Scott Mason, Artsci’14, Oleg Baranov, Sc’15 and Taylor Mann, Artsci’15, had what they thought was a brilliant business idea.
The three, who were a part of the Queen’s Summer Innovation Initiative, came up with a product that uses ultraviolet light to help people disinfect their cell phones. “What we discovered,” Mr. Mason says, “is that maybe the market was not as strong as we thought it was. And we found ourselves in a very strange place. We were a solution in search of a problem.”
Today the owners of CleanSlate UV have found their problem in the COVID-19 crisis. And their solution is meeting an important need for the health-care community and beyond.
CleanSlate UV’s first shift happened in the summer of 2014 after a trip to Kingston General Hospital. “Staff members started asking us really interesting questions,” Mr. Mason says. “They were saying, ‘Hey, can I put my stethoscope into this machine? Does it kill pathogens like C Difficile?’”
Those conversations were the inspiration behind CleanSlate UV’s decision to pivot the business away from consumers and their cell phones and become an industrial-grade small-device disinfecting service for hospitals.
CleanSlate UV has recently received $7 million in private funding that will help the team bring their product back to the masses. Mr. Mason says the financial influx gives CleanSlate UV the working capital necessary to onboard a sales team and a customer success team to better serve clients. It also gives them the capital necessary to stock this product. The amount of product that’s being ordered right now is “really unprecedented. It’s the largest quantity of orders that we’ve ever seen in the company’s history,” he says.
Right now, the CleanSlate UV machines are in more than 150 facilities in 80 health-care networks. That number is growing rapidly as the demand for cleanliness increases. “We are now getting calls from industries outside of healthcare, pharmaceutical processing. We are now selling to dentist offices, even police forces have been reaching out to us, and border services,” Mr. Mason says.
Six years after the launch of CleanSlate UV, Mr. Mason says he and his partners will never forget how they got their start. “As a young company, we received tremendous help from Queen’s
alumni and staff,” he says. “Ultimately, CleanSlate UV would not exist if it wasn’t for that QSI program or the volunteer efforts of the staff associated with that program. We are just incredibly grateful.”
Are you or another Queen's graduate you know making a difference in the fight against COVID-19? Tell us.
