Duo of doctoral students invent the "Vinted" of chemical products

They first met on university benches. Louis Ambroise has been studying at the University of Bordeaux since his first year of undergraduate studies. A university karate champion, he met his partner Quentin Gouty during their Bachelor degree in chemistry. Now both pursuing doctorates, Louis in Bordeaux and Quentin in Pau, they still enjoy a fruitful collaboration. Five questions to the inventors:

You both founded the company nHomade, the "Vinted" of chemical products. How did you get to this stage?

Louis Ambroise: The idea for the project began to emerge during our work placements in laboratories. We realised that after experiments with chemicals, many of them were spoiled, burnt or buried. It's complicated to destroy chemicals, which are often flammable and dangerous to health. What's more, they're very expensive. We decided to create a more virtuous circle.

Quentin Gouty: We signed up for a seminar at the University of Bordeaux's incubator, UBee Lab, to learn about entrepreneurship. By the end of the week, we already had a first draft of our business model! We then moved on to the next stage, which was applying for the National Student Entrepreneur Status (SNEE), and since September 2023 we have been incubated.

What is nHomade ?

Louis Ambroise: Designed for researchers, lecturer-researchers, post-docs and PhD students, nHomade is an online platform for exchanging chemical products. We want to pool the inventories of all laboratories, so that each group in the same laboratory or each institution can communicate on the sale or research of chemical products whenever it wishes.

Quentin Gouty: In the world of chemical products, there are many prerogatives and requirements to meet. Hosted on a French server, our website combines inventory, product hazard classification and the sale/purchase of a chemical product.

What are your upcoming projects for nHomade?

Quentin Gouty: In the future, we would like to recruit web developers and R&D developers to take our innovative solution even further. At the moment, we can't afford to do that, but fund-raising could be the way forward.

Louis Ambroise: We hope to organise subsequent conferences to raise awareness among researchers of the need to exchange chemical products, and to persuade more senior profiles to adopt these new habits. Another challenge - in the more distant future - is exporting our solution to Europe, with European standards to be met.

It's quite rare to come across doctoral students embarking on an entrepreneurial project at the same time as their thesis. How do you reconcile the two?

Quentin Gouty: With a lot of organisation! Especially as I have two young children who take up a lot of my time: 2 and a half and 9 months, it's a real party at home!

Louis Ambroise: We both work from home, time is short and we divide the tasks between us. We do, however, travel together on laboratory visits, for example. It's becoming a routine that works well.

What do you enjoy about this entrepreneurial adventure?

Quentin Gouty: The impact! Ecological awareness is gradually awakening, and we want to increase this awareness in laboratories. The aim is to develop the n-homade.com website so that it is up and running by the end of our thesis.

Louis Ambroise: The excitement of bringing the project to fruition. It's very gratifying, and we have nothing to be ashamed of when compared with specific American websites.