R&D Partnering with Kevin Leland

What It Covers

Kevin Leland, founder and CEO of Halo.science, explains how his AI-powered platform connects academic researchers and science-led startups with corporate R&D teams. Starting from a failed crowdfunding concept, Halo evolved into a sector-agnostic marketplace modeled on LinkedIn, now partnering with Bayer, Pepsi, and Baxter.

Key Questions Answered

• •Bootstrapping a two-sided marketplace: Solve the chicken-and-egg problem by identifying "power nodes" — university tech transfer offices, corporate relations officers, and accelerators — who already know which researchers match specific technical needs. Halo's first 300 scientist sign-ups came entirely through a single NACRO newsletter, not paid acquisition, by embedding within existing trusted distribution channels.
• •Proposal design for conversion: Researchers spend roughly 40% of their time on grant paperwork. Halo reduced this to approximately one hour by standardizing five universal questions — hypothesis, rationale, validation, and relevant publications/patents/grants — across all corporate partners, functioning as a common application regardless of industry sector or company size.
• •First customer shapes platform trajectory unexpectedly: Baxter's water purification challenge attracted chemical engineers and material scientists, not biotech specialists. That initial talent pool directly enabled landing Pepsi as a second customer for sustainable packaging work — demonstrating that scientific expertise crosses industry boundaries in non-obvious ways that can expand total addressable market.
• •AI matching beyond keyword tagging: Rather than relying on self-reported expertise, Halo's RoboScout tool scans patent, publication, and grant databases across millions of data points to identify relevant researchers proactively. The next stage involves training proprietary LLMs on internal proposal data — which Leland describes as the real competitive asset — to surface non-obvious researcher-company matches.
• •Corporate accelerators as a scalable growth channel: Halo launched a marketplace for corporate-sponsored incubators, starting with Bayer's CoLab network across Cambridge, Kobe, Shanghai, and Berlin. Startups apply once using existing profiles to multiple programs simultaneously, while companies like BASF and PepsiCo are in discussions to list their accelerators, creating a recurring pipeline beyond one-off sponsored research agreements.