Data cloud provider TetraScience has secured an $80 million series B investment to speed up the discovery of therapeutics. Enterprise pharma and biotech organizations use the TetraScience R&D Data Cloud to easily access centralized and standardized scientific data.
Global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners and investment firm Alkeon Capital Management led the investing round.
TetraScience reports that it grew by 10x in 2020. Started by researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the company has raised $92.5 million between March 2019 and March 2021.
“This massive injection of capital validates our category leadership and enables us to materially accelerate our go-to-market capabilities, expand our industry-leading technical capabilities and grow our cross-domain team of scientific, data science and cloud experts,” Patrick Grady, TetraScience CEO and chairman, told Fierce Healthcare.
Grady said the company is looking to shift from a focus on project-based IT to products and networks. He noted that global pharmaceutical companies work with experimental data on a “piecemeal, point-to-point basis,” but a network-based platform offers more opportunities for integrations.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the need for cloud computing and its ability to automate processes for the public and private sector as well as organize and engineer data, according to Grady.
“The pandemic has served as a catalyst for re-platforming R&D data to the cloud, to accelerate discovery and improve and extend human life,” Grady said.
Nikhil Sachdev, managing director at Insight Partners, said the company decided to invest in TetraScience during the COVID-19 pandemic because of the data cloud company’s ability to centralize data for pharmaceutical companies.
“COVID-19 put the spotlight on the need to digitize the healthcare, pharma and biotech industries and the need for new tech to create more efficient processes,” Sachdev told Fierce Healthcare. “TetraScience's data cloud provides life science companies with the flexibility, scalability and data-centric capabilities to enable easy access to centralized, actionable scientific data.”
Sachdev said Insight Partners chooses to invest in software scale-ups, which are companies in a high growth phase. It also follows industry patterns and software trends and targets emerging tech markets, he said. He considers TetraScience a leader in the $300 billion data cloud industry.
Insight Partners has led funding rounds in several other healthcare companies recently. In March it announced an investment in enterprise analytics company Clarify Health, which secured $115 million in series C funding for its healthcare analytics cloud and business software. The VC firm also led a $50 million round of series D funding for modular device and telehealth company Tyto Care.
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TetraScience consists of three components: Tetra Data Platform is an R&D open platform for accessing life sciences data. It collects, harmonizes and processes data while also customizing it for life science and R&D workflows, according to Grady.
“In a nutshell, the Tetra Data Platform saves researchers’ time and breaks down silos, accelerating discovery,” Grady said.
Meanwhile, Tetra Partner Network is an ecosystem of pharmaceutical and biotech companies, lab instruments, lab information management systems and contract development and manufacturing organizations. Life science companies use Tetra Partner Network to test prebuilt integrations, data models, frameworks and data applications.
A third component, Tetra Solutions Team, comprises software applications customized for R&D workflows and business needs. It uses best practices from pharmaceutical and biotech organizations to boost scientific discovery using tools, data models and pipelines.
TetraScience says its cloud platform along with machine learning applications will serve as the building blocks for future R&D discovery.
“Today, many R&D organizations are unable to fully utilize artificial intelligence/machine learning techniques to accelerate discovery, because their data is poorly managed, structured and shared,” Grady said. “By acquiring and harmonizing data from the largest network of heterogeneous sources, and making it available via the cloud, TetraScience prepares experimental data for AI/ML applications that are fueling the next wave of discovery in life sciences R&D.”
Sachdev added that the interoperability of TetraScience’s open platform will let analytics and data science partners innovate in life sciences R&D in the future.