Toronto-based ODAIA, an AI-powered commercial insights platform for pharmaceutical companies, has raised $13.8 million in Series A funding led by Flint Capital. The platform combines data analysis, process mining and AI to offer predictive analytics to pharmaceutical and life sciences commercial teams. The funding round comes as the company doubled the size of its team over the past year.
The startup aims to help pharmaceutical commercial teams determine what they need to know about their prescribers so they can deliver the right message through the best channels and ultimately get their therapeutics to the patients that need them. The startup was founded at the University of Toronto in 2018 after years of research and development in the areas of process mining, customer journey mapping and AI.
“Some of the early research work was centered around analyzing patient journeys and using AI and Machine Learning to optimize those journeys,” ODAIA co-founder and CEO Philip Poulidis told TechCrunch in an email. “It evolved over time to include the analysis of many different, but related, data sources, including prescriber transactions, anonymized patient health claims data, population demographic and socioeconomic data, anonymized lab data, and more. All of this research and engineering development work culminated in the launch of MAPTUAL, a SaaS platform that analyzes the data sets outlined above to provide predictive insights, prioritize and dynamically segment physicians that are treating patients who would be ideal candidates for target therapeutics.”
The funding round announced today included participation from Innospark Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Graphite Ventures and ODAIA’s current investors, including BDC Capital, MaRS IAF, StandUp Ventures, Panache Ventures and others. The company says the new funding will be used to enhance platform features and to expand sales, marketing and customer success teams to support market expansion.
“With the new round of capital, we will accelerate the development of our product roadmap by expanding our product and software engineering teams, expand our commercial teams, and grow our platform integration partnerships,” Poulidis said.
The company says the pandemic has changed the customer-facing pharma business and that digital transformation is now the main priority. In terms of the future, Poulidis said the startup’s goal is to provide a one-stop shop for multivariate data analysis and predictive insights of life sciences data in a single platform. He outlined that the platform will include features and capabilities that will enable life sciences companies to better understand the journey of their prescribers and patients and react in real time by leveraging data and AI.
The startup’s Series A round follows its $1.6 million seed investment announced in 2019. That round was co-led by Panache Ventures and StandUp Ventures with participation from BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Venture Fund, Inovia Capital and MaRS IAF. This group of investors joined pre-seed investors including Toronto Innovation Acceleration Partners, University of Toronto’s UTEST, N49P, Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) and Amar Varma, the co-founder of Autonomic.ai (acquired by Ford).
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