Bio-Rad Labs: First Berkeley Startup
Company founded: 1952
Founders: Alice Schwartz (UC Berkeley Bachelors Degree, biochemistry), David Schwartz (UC Berkeley Bachelors Degree, chemistry)
Bio-Rad Laboratories is among UC Berkeley’s first successful spinout companies, and it’s still thriving as of 2025. It was founded by two UC Berkeley undergraduate alumni, Alice and David Schwartz, who both received chemistry degrees. After graduating, they married and cofounded Bio-Rad in 1952. The name Bio-Rad comes from the words biochemicals and radio-chemicals, the company’s first products.1
The Schwartzes opened their first laboratory in a 1,600-square-foot Quonset hut in Berkeley with just $720 in savings. By 1960, Bio-Rad’s operations in biological discovery and health-care research had expanded to eleven employees and $150,000 in sales. In 1966, the company reached $1 million in annual sales and became a publicly traded company. As of 2024, Bio-Rad had seventy-eight hundred employees and $2.5 billion in annual sales of life science research tools and clinical diagnostics.
For more than seventy years Bio-Rad products and systems have provided clinical information for blood transfusions, diabetes monitoring, and autoimmune and infectious disease testing. These products have helped advance the discovery process in research labs around the world and support the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of diseases and other medical conditions.
1 The first documented commercialization of a technology developed by a UC Berkeley professor was in 1907, when Frederick Cottrell invented an electrostatic precipitator. Cottrell believed that the university shouldn’t participate in business, and there wasn’t a university policy regarding faculty inventions. So Cottrell founded the Research Corporation to commercialize his invention. Source: Kenney and Goe, “Role of Social Embeddedness in Professorial Entrepreneurship.”
Published in Startup Campus: How UC Berkeley Became an Unexpected Leader in Entrepreneurship and Startups, August 2025
