A third-year student at 첥Ƶ's has co-founded a startup designed to solve a persistent challenge in academic research: the scattered, fragmented way that labs store and track their work.
Max Rudakov is a co-founder and business lead of Lapis Research, an AI-powered research management platform built to help research teams keep all their work – documents, lab notes, datasets, experimental decisions and project timelines – in one place. It was developed by a five-student team from York, Queen’s University, Western University, the University of Guelph and the University of Waterloo.
When notes, datasets and decisions are dispersed across emails, shared drives and personal laptops, there's no centralized place to see what's been done, why it was done or what the current project status is.
The idea sparked about a year ago with a Reddit post from the team asking whether people were struggling with how documents were organized and used. The strong response – 187,000 views and 350 comments – prompted the team to dig deeper, and conversations with researchers soon showed the issue was pronounced in academic research.
More than a year of interviews with over 100 professors, lab managers and researchers, along with about 20 design partners, kept surfacing the same issues: poor visibility across projects, fragmented documentation and knowledge departing when team members moved on.
For Rudakov, the path to Lapis was as much personal as practical. At Schulich, he found himself questioning the traditional routes into finance and looking for something that better matched his strengths.
"I realized that my skill set belongs in building something from the ground up," he says. "It feels good to know that I can make a change, especially in such a rigorous industry like research."
York's contribution to the development of Lapis is concrete. Rudakov led the business strategy, growth planning and early outreach from his side, and many of the early interviews were conducted with York-based researchers – including people working in kinesiology and oncology research – whose feedback helped shape core features.
The real-world insights helped inform the design of the tool, tailoring it to the specific needs of the academic community.
Lapis works by structuring research projects into linked workspaces. When a researcher finishes an experiment, they can save their data and notes directly to Lapis. The tool automatically records who added the notes and when, creating a clear record of progress.
This means a professor or lab lead can view the activity of multiple projects without sending a single email.
When a new team member joins, they can ask the Lapis AI system, Neural Core, questions such as "What approach did we try for this and why did we change directions?" and receive a summary drawn from the project's files.
“Onboarding can drop from months to a couple of weeks or even days because everything is preserved – the data, the decisions and the reasoning behind why things were done a certain way,” says Rudakov. “A new researcher can open the project and understand the full picture without having to ask everyone what happened before they got there.”
During development, York-based researchers found value in helping to shape those features. Duygu Biricik Gulseren, an associate professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, reviewed the platform and provided insight on how academics manage multiple projects, supervise students at different stages and keep track of different versions of documents and files as multiple people work on them.
"A platform like this can improve coordination and also make the work more transparent and traceable across people and projects," she says.
Eric Ginzburg, an undergraduate student completing an independent study in York's biomechanics lab, also shared feedback, noting he sees the appeal of more centralized system.
"It simplifies the process of handling a team and a larger research project," he says.
Lapis is currently running pilot programs at the University of Guelph and Queen's University.
Rudakov hopes to bring Lapis to York research teams in the next stage of its growth – a natural fit given its development was informed in part through York connections and conversations.
"York has over 50 research teams and the problems we solve are the same ones they deal with every day," he says. "We want the York research community to know Lapis exists, and that it was partly built by York students and shaped by York researchers."
With files from Mzwandile Poncana