On Tuesday, a startup challenging the traditional real-world data industry announced the closing of its Series A funding round.
Based in New York New raised $18 million, bringing its total funding amount to $28 million. Series A was led by Spark Capitalwith the participation of Khosla Ventures, TMV, Acre Capital And Capital Bling.
The startup, founded in 2023, operates a patient-authorized real-world data platform. This platform allows patients to bring together years of medical records from different providers into a single record, as well as choose whether or not to provide anonymized data for pharmaceutical research, explained CEO Shashi Shankar.
Before co-founding Novellia with CTO Elliot Katz, Shankar spent nearly a decade at Genentech working on real-world data, partnerships and product launches. Toward the end of his tenure there, he became convinced that emerging interoperability rules would eventually allow patients to easily access their medical records.
He said he was increasingly obsessed with how to create a more comprehensive longitudinal view of health care pathways than traditional real-world data sources could provide. The idea became personal when Shankar’s grandfather died of gastroesophageal cancer.
Watching his mother coordinate care across multiple providers highlighted the fragmentation of health data, which inspired him to create a patient-centered platform.
In his eyes, traditional providers of real-world data operate largely the same way: buying data from brokers, health systems and other third parties.
Because this data is fragmented and often without direct patient consent, it is difficult to create a complete picture of a person’s healthcare history. Novellia was built around the idea that a patient-centered approach could result in more comprehensive data sets, Shankar noted.
With comprehensive data sets, pharmaceutical companies can generate more precise evidence on safety, effectiveness and patterns of care, he added.
“They can’t really put together one complete patient history,” Shankar said. “When you call a pharmaceutical company, one of the biggest frustrations is, ‘We spend $80 million to $100 million a year on real-world data, and we have no idea what’s going on.’ » »
Novellia’s model is different from other real-world data companies because it collects data directly from patients rather than purchasing it from intermediaries. Shankar said patients can consolidate their records from virtually any healthcare provider, lab or clinic they have visited.
Patients use the platform for free. Novellia generates revenue by providing anonymized information to pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies, which they use to inform their R&D efforts.
Shankar said the startup already works with the majority of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies. Novellia’s platform helps them better understand security signals and outcomes in real-world settings, he said.
For example, Shankar pointed out that Novellia helped a client analyze safety issues surrounding a breast cancer drug, and the platform ended up finding a lower incidence of suspected adverse event than previously thought.
The startup has also contributed to research into care variation. She studied biomarker testing patterns and found significant differences between doctors practicing in centers of excellence and those in community settings, Shankar noted.
Data validation is another key use case he highlighted. By comparing multiple data sources, Novellia identified physician transcription errors in lab records that other data sets would have missed, he said.
These examples illustrate the value proposition presented by Novellia: health data must first work for patients – and this will ultimately also enable better insights for researchers.
Photo: Maskot, Getty Images
