Life sciences companies, such as large pharmaceutical companies, have unique needs when it comes to building applications. Their models and algorithms tend to be more sophisticated and data-intensive than most industries. quantitativea Cambridge, MA-based startup is building a Platform-as-a-Service specifically tailored to the needs of this industry.
Trying to position itself as uniquely primed to partner with this market, the startup today announced a $15 million seed investment at a $100 million post-money valuation.
It certainly makes some bold claims, saying, “Quantori’s data engineering and data science platform for drug discovery and development aims to build a new data integration and high-performance computing environment for global and early-stage biopharmaceutical companies. The platform is capable of to cut the cost and time of delivery to patients in half, and it can also facilitate the completion of complex computing tasks 5-10 times faster,” the company said.
Yuri Gankin, co-founder and chief science officer at Quantori, says the founders back these claims with decades of experience in this market, including helping launch and build a company called GGA Software Services, which also focused on the life sciences. market, and wash acquired by EPAM in 2014.
Gankin said the company, which launched in 2020, already has 700 employees, many of whom also have life sciences expertise. He said they have been able to bring in so many employees before getting a penny of outside capital by initially focusing on professional services, helping customers build applications while generating revenue.
“We have positioned ourselves for rapid growth from the start. So we were initially focused on revenue. And we believe that our professional services will also better inform us about the needs of companies [in this market] have in technology development, and the revenue from those activities will also help support technology development,” he said.
And it is through that consulting work that the company has built this platform of basic services with the broader vision of letting customers build their own applications, or continue to hire the professional Quantori service team to assist them.
“The goal is to create a platform-based service business, so it’s not a product business, but we’ll build platform accelerators and integrate and customize them for our customers. So there will always be a license component and a service component.”
To date, they support more than 30 clients, including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Takeda and Biogen, and expect to generate approximately $30 million in revenue this year, according to Gankin.
They are still building the platform components, but it will eventually include a discovery engine, a high performance computing component, data engineering and finally data analytics. Gankin says customers can mix and match these components as they wish.
With more than 700 employees, it’s already a substantial organization, and Gankin says diversity is extremely important to him and the founding team. “This is one of the pain points that I am trying to overcome and that we have put a lot of effort into. We’re doing quite well on gender diversity, especially in our delivery organizations. We have many talented men and women with LGBTQ communities who are also well represented. And we also have racial diversity here, albeit to a lesser extent,” he said.
He said he struggles to find women for his business development organization, but that’s something he’s actively working on.
Today’s investment came from Boston-based Flint Capital. The company got off to an early start before it could rely on consulting services for revenue.