Australia-based healthcare analytics startup Prospection raised A$10 million in its first external funding round, led by Main Sequence Ventures’ CSIRO Innovation Fund and Horizons Ventures, the company announced earlier this week. The funds will be used to accelerate the company’s healthcare analytics platforms into new therapy areas, grow its artificial intelligence capabilities, and expand into Asia Pacific.

WHAT THEY DO

Prospection was founded out of Sydney’s Cicada Innovations in 2012 and the company uses predictive analytics and machine learning, with real-world healthcare data, to unearth insights that improve patient outcomes. 

According to Prospection, their platforms are already used by 15 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies and by researchers like UNSW’s Kirby Institute, to better understand treatment outcomes across 70 therapy programs, including immuno-oncology, HIV and hepatitis. 

Prospection has two main products/platforms listed on their website – its flagship platform PharmDash, which was developed in-house and launched in 2012, “analyzes what drugs a patient’s taking, how they progress through different treatments, and how the drugs help them treat their disease,” said Eric Chung, Prospection’s CEO and co-founder in a UNSW Engineering blogpost in 2015.

The other platform is PharmMap, which allows users to “integrate commercial and operational data to a single view using geospatial mapping algorithms.”

The Australian company has clients across New Zealand, Japan, China and South Korea and plans to establish a presence in South Korea and Japan this year. 

MARKET SNAPSHOT

Healthcare-related data analytics/predict analytics startups seem to be raking in lots of investment interest. Medopad, a UK-based company which uses AI to collect and analyze data and then predict different medical conditions and outcomes, raised $25M in series B funding last November, MobiHealthNews reported. 

Seattle-based predictive analytics platform startup, KenSci, which scored $22M in Series B funding in February 2019, is able to ingest data from multiple sources including EHRs, claims statements, pharmacy history and wearable data.

ON THE RECORD

“At Prospection, delivering a real community benefit is at the core of everything we do. Ultimately, we want to help improve outcomes for patients through better insights and predictive analytics. Main Sequence Ventures and Horizons Ventures understand the long term vision we have to deliver better healthcare and the technology we’re developing to get there. We couldn’t have better partners backing us in the next stage of our growth,” said Eric Chung, CEO and co-founder, Prospection in a statement.