Elucidata, a TechBio company that powers life science research & development (R&D) with its data-centric Machine Learning Operations (ML-Ops) platform, Polly, announced that it has raised $16 million in a Series A fundraising today. The round was led by leading global investment firm Eight Roads Ventures, with participation from F-Prime Capital, IvyCap Ventures, and Hyperplane Venture Capital. The newly infused capital will be used to deepen product capabilities in translational drug research and allied markets, scale go-to-market initiatives, and accelerate global expansion of operations.
Successful AI/ML initiatives are built on high-quality data. Elucidata’s platform Polly, enables pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies to adopt a data-centric approach for successful AI/ML initiatives. Polly provides R&D teams access to clean, curated biomolecular data that can be queried and analyzed over a graphical user interface (GUI) or programmatically.
Used by leading life sciences companies on over 2.5 million biomolecular datasets, Polly leverages proprietary Bio-NLP technology to rapidly curate biomedical data with human-levels of accuracy, making it machine learning-ready (ML-ready).
“Organizations often underestimate the importance of data quality, and as a result, a lot of AI/ML initiatives are compromised. We’re on a mission to derisk such initiatives in life sciences R&D by empowering them with high-quality biomedical data at every stage of the R&D process,” said Dr. Abhishek Jha, CEO, and Co-Founder of Elucidata. “The new infusion of capital is a testament to how Polly is creating value for its customers by cleaning and linking data at scale. I am thrilled to have world-class investors at the table as we continue to build a category-defining company.
Elucidata sees the era of AI as one in which life sciences companies leverage the benefits of AI. This would require a complete reimagination of the current “model-centric” AI narrative, that has largely been driven by internet companies, but does not apply to niche industries like life sciences R&D.
“Deciphering insights from biomedical data is at the heart of addressing the world’s most important breakthroughs in biopharmaceuticals. There is an explosion in the generation of these complex, heterogeneous datasets, driven by innovations in sequencing technologies and the proliferation of connected devices. Elucidata’s technology platform seeks to democratize access to curated biomedical data at scale, allowing biopharmaceutical companies to accelerate the discovery and development of novel therapies. We are proud to partner with Abhishek, Swetabh, and the team on their vision to accelerate data-centric drug discovery and development.” said Ashish Venkataramani, Partner, Eight Roads Ventures.
Events of interest in life sciences are rare. Predicting these events is critically dependent on the availability of high-quality data to base the predictive model on, which is a key tenet of the data-centric approach.
“When it comes to AI projects, the quality of labeled data can play a vital role in the difference between success and failure,” said Nihal Sinha, M.D., Partner at F-Prime Capital. “Elucidata is providing life science companies access to high-quality datasets and, as a result, effectively accelerating their R&D efforts towards developing innovative solutions that can improve human health.”
Today, 30+ premier life science companies, including Genentech, Pfizer, Janssen as well as research institutes like Stanford and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are leveraging Polly to significantly shorten their drug discovery cycles.
Elucidata was founded in 2015 by University of Chicago and MIT graduate Dr. Abhishek Jha and IIT Delhi alumnus Swetabh Pathak. The company’s cutting-edge platform Polly operates on unique Bio-NLP technology that cleans and links 26+ R&D data types and caters to companies in various stages of their drug discovery process. The platform helps data science teams scale by providing them 70 TB of ML-Ready biomedical data, from ~30 public and proprietary sources. Today, 3 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies are using Polly to fast track their R&D initiatives. For more information, visit https://www.elucidata.io/.
Eight Roads Ventures is a global venture capital firm backed by Fidelity, managing $11 billion of assets across offices in China, India, Japan, the UK, and the U.S. Our 50-year history of investing includes partnerships with over 300 healthcare and technology companies. In May this year, Eight Roads launched its first dedicated US$250 million healthcare and life sciences fund for India. Eight Roads Ventures’ India active and exited healthcare partner companies include Ashish Life Science, Caplin Steriles, Carestack, Cipla Health, Core Diagnostics, Denali Therapeutics, Doceree, Eywa Pharma, Elucidata, Immuneel Therapeutics, Laurus Labs, Medwell Ventures, NOCD, Plasmagen Biosciences, Proximie, OZiva, PharmEasy, Richcore Lifesciences, Specsmakers, Spry, Toothsi, Trivitron Healthcare, and Ujala Cygnus. More information: https://eightroads.com
