Tag: Eight Roads

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Coho AI, which uses AI to help B2B SaaS companies boost revenue, raises $8.5M

Teams dedicated to boosting customer acquisition, retention and sales don’t necessarily have the time or tools to use data insights effectively. In a 2019 survey, NewVantage partners found that the percentage of firms identifying themselves as being data-driven declined in each of the past three years, with over half admitting that they’re not competing on data and analytics. 

That’s why Ariel Maislos, who sold semiconductor startup Anobit to Apple for $400 million in 2012, partnered with Itamar Falcon and Michael Ehrlich to launch Coho AI, a product-led revenue optimization platform designed to help businesses — specifically software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses — access insights for upselling and growth.

Coho AI today announced that it raised $8.5 million in a seed funding round led by Eight Roads, TechAviv and angel investors. CEO Falcon says that the capital will be put toward product R&D and expanding the size of Coho AI’s team, which currently stands at 17 people.

“Coho AI has developed a unique data consolidation platform that models the business value of a software-as-a-service company and maps it to the behavior of the customers in real time using machine learning and advanced analytics,” Falcon told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Coho AI’s behavioral modeling allows the crafting of personalized customer journeys that improve conversion metrics and help revenue teams, from sales and customer success, together with product teams, achieve higher growth and sales efficiencies.”

Coho AI’s target audience is sales, customer success and product teams within business-to-business (B2B) SaaS companies. The platform provides AI models to discover what makes a product “sticky” and what drives users to upgrade to a paid B2B SaaS subscription plan, as well as real-time usage models to spotlight upsell opportunities and churn risks and segmentation models to identify different users based on their behavior.

Falcon says that all the models are trained using anonymized data from Coho Ai’s customer base. “By doing so, we are creating a network effect that each of our customers gets the benefits of a larger data set, which results in a more accurate model,” he added.

Beyond the AI-driven features, Coho AI delivers a single source of truth that sales, product and customer success teams can pull data from on both users and accounts. An observability dashboard enables growth teams to identify where users are in the customer journey and tailor a specific experience to reduce drop-offs, while real-time triggers highlight growth opportunities including “free-to-play? and upsells.

“There is skepticism among SaaS leaders about whether an external tool can model their unique product value and turn it into actionable insights for go-to-market teams,” Falcon said. “[But] Coho AI truly helps companies improve metrics such as net revenue retention rate and sales efficiency, which have become more crucial in the current economic climate.”

Coho AI competes with startups including Correlated and Endgame, but Falcon says that the company already has “dozens” of customers and partners. He declined to provide revenue figures, however.

Coho AI, which uses AI to help B2B SaaS companies boost revenue, raises $8.5M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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Reveal raises $50M to espouse the benefits of partner ecosystems

Business-to-business (B2B) companies are generating an increasing percentage of their revenue through partner ecosystems. In a 2018 Accenture survey, 76% of business leaders said that current business models will be unrecognizable in the next five years, with ecosystems being the main change agent. But despite their growing importance, businesses haven’t necessarily adopted technology to foster partnerships, instead relying on spreadsheets and lengthy virtual or in-person meetings.

Perhaps as a result, business ecosystems — while profitable — have a high failure rate. Research by BCG found that fewer than 15% were sustainable in the long run. But it doesn’t have to be this way. That’s according to Reveal CEO Simon Bouchez, who alongside Gautier Machelon, Perrine El Khoury, and Alex Sadones aims to build a platform that allows B2B companies to more easily identify sales opportunities with their partners.

With customers including Qualtrics, Tealium, Contentsquare, and Vonage. Reveal today announced that it raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners with participation from Eight Roads, Chalfen Ventures, and Dig Ventures. The capital brings the startup’s total raised to about $54 million.

“Organizations create 2x more value when selling to a partner customer,” Bouchez told TechCrunch via email. “But most of the time, companies don’t know how to capture this value and don’t invest in partnerships. Partnership leaders still don’t have a clear seat at the revenue table.”

Before launching Reveal in 2020, Bouchez was the CEO of Multiposting, an HR tech startup, until 2018, when it was acquired by SAP. Sadones was the CTO at Multiposting, while Gautier cofounded employee sourcing and hiring platform Work4. Khoury was the director of business development at Work4.

Initially, Reveal, which was founded as Sharework, was focused on automated sales account mapping — i.e., the process of cataloging the people that work at a particular target account. But in 2020, the startup began to broaden its product strategy, targeting marketers seeking to create and convert sales leads.

Some might argue that Reveal’s product falls into the category of ecosystem management, or tools to navigate and manage B2B partner ecosystems. But Bouchez argues that Reveal goes a step further by involving sales and marketing teams in the process for lead generation, sales enablement, and ecosystem expansion.

“We believe we have created a new category: a collaborative growth platform enabling companies to leverage their ecosystem to accelerate growth,” Bouchez said. “Our closest competitor would be an Excel spreadsheet or companies not yet tapping into this growth potential. Of course, we are expecting competitors as our space grows and attracts investment from top investors, and many companies — like Partnerstack, Crossbeam, and Workspan — are growing fast.”

Reveal ingests data from existing customer relationship management systems to identify common sales accounts as well as potential new leads. Algorithms attempt to identify the top partners to add to a company’s ecosystem, even if the company isn’t directly connected to them.

Reveal

Image Credits: Reveal

Within the platform, ecosystems are composed of partners in the same industry, targeting the same customer segment, or selling a complementary product. The idea is that companies can connect with a partner’s account owners through Reveal to get introductions to key decision makers.

Throughout the process, using proprietary methods (Bouchez declined to go into detail), Reveal attempts to quantify the ecosystem influence on a company’s overall sales pipeline and revenue.

“Reveal … allows partnership professionals to quickly identify common customers and prospects with partners to generate more business opportunities,” Bouchez said. “Users [can] discover new relevant partners across the Reveal network.”

Reveal claims that its algorithms — which process more than 200 million customer relationship management records from the company’s over 4,500 customers — are accurate, but it hasn’t conducted outside testing to verify this. Reveal is more transparent about its data collection and retention policies, claiming to not store personally identifiable information and delete customer relationship management data “as soon as the user requests it.”

“Security and compliance has been a top priority from day one to allow our users to trust us with sensitive and important data in full confidence,” Bouchez said.

Reveal’s future plans include tripling its 40-employee headcount (within the next 18 months), investing in product development, and expanding its online learning hub for partnership professionals. Over the long term, Bouchez hopes to build the largest network of “connected companies,” with the tentative goal of eclipsing 20,000 companies by the end of 2023.

“Reveal is quickly becoming a leader in collaborative growth, an emerging category that integrates into a company’s customer relationship management system and serves as a bridge to partner customer relationship management systems,” Insight Partners’ Brad Fielder, who plans to join Reveal’s board, told TechCrunch in a statement. “Reveal allows sales teams to identify new opportunities and utilize partner connections to close deals like never before.”

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Amenitiz gets $30M for SaaS it bills as ‘Shopify for hotels’

Barcelona-based Amenitiz, which sells software-as-a-service for streamlining the administration of independent hotels and B&Bs which it shorthands as ‘Shopify for hotels’, has closed a $30 million Series A a few months after it announced a $7.5M seed.

The latest round is led by VC firm Eight Roads, with Chalfen Ventures and existing investors Point-Nine, Backed and Otium Capital also participating.

The 2018-founded SaaS maker isn’t disclosing its valuation for this raise but says it’s scaled its property management system (PMS) SaaS bundle to serving 4,000+ properties across 37 countries — up from 3,000 last November.

As well as enabling day-to-day ops, such as guest management, communication and invoicing — including Amenitiz’s own brand payment module — the fully integrated software platform includes a website builder and a channel manager, the letter designed to help independent hotels and guest houses to stay on top of multiple third party platforms where their property may be advertised (e.g. booking.com, Expedia etc).

It also connects customers to a marketplace of third party software tools to cater to additional requirements they may have.

The new funding will be used to expand into more European markets and launch more products on its platforms — along with further scaling the size of Amenitiz’s team, with a plan to grow from 150 people to around 350 by the end of this year.

Alexandre Guinefolleau, CEO of Amenitiz, told TechCrunch: “When we raised our seed round with Point-Nine, we did it with very specific goals in mind. We wanted to build our internationalisation playbook with the opening of Spain and Italy, launch AmenitizPay to simplify the way our hotels manage payments and start recruiting some strong leadership while also scaling the team (which we have done from 30 to 150 employees in 2021).

“With all those boxes ticked and seeing strong investor interest, we decided that now would be a good time to accelerate, raise another round and keep scaling in Europe.”

Amenitiz already has some customers for its SaaS outside the region but France was its first market of focus and it will continue to direct resource on expanding in Europe for now.

It notes that the region has some 700,000 hotels, bed & breakfast and vacation rentals, 80% of which are independent properties of 50 rooms or less — meaning they fall into the independent segment Amenitiz is targeting.

“France was our initial market (and the only one we focused on for the first three years). Since then, we have seen a fantastic response from Italy and Spain, which we launched in 2021 with similar acquisition metrics and initial growth,” says Guinefolleau. “The plan is to focus on Europe for now as it’s one of the largest tourism markets in the world but to quickly expand into new continents in the coming years (US & LatAm as a first expansion most likely).”

With the new funding, Guinefolleau says Amenitiz is targeting launching in the UK, Ireland, Portugal, Germany and “potentially” Greece — which he notes that, along with its existing markets, represent 90% of the European tourism market.

On the product dev front, he says they’ll be adding more features that keep helping making hoteliers’ processes “faster and smoother”.

“Still, the most notable will be our Revenue Management System, allowing hoteliers to automate their pricing strategy based on their past occupancy and market data,” he adds.

Amenitiz’s SaaS essentially replaces the functionality of 3-4 different providers for target indie hoteliers — centralizing all that tooling on a single platform in order to streamline the admin burden.

“In Europe, most of our competitive market is made of very local, legacy providers, usually country or even, in some cases, region-specific,” says Guinefolleau. “In France, it would be the likes of Eviivo, Vega (PMS), MisterBooking (PMS), Reservit (Channel-manager & Booking-Engine) and a lot of small, local WordPress agencies building websites.

“Globally our biggest competitor would be Cloudbeds which is US and LatAm focused but offers a similar suite of products.”

Commenting on the Series A raise in a statement, Lucile Cornet, partner at Eight Roads and also now an Amenitiz board member, said: “Amenitiz has shown impressive momentum despite the pandemic. This shows how a 10x better product, which is intuitive and easy to use, can quickly achieve product-market fit in a sector that has seen very little innovation in the past few decades. We’re excited to work together with Alex, Emma and Fred.”

SoftBank backs Cloudbeds as hospitality industry awakens from its COVID slumber

Amenitiz wants to upgrade the tech stack of independent hotels

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7bridges raises $17M to automate logistics supply chains using AI

Supply chain logistics — getting components and eventually finished products from A to B to C — is one of the most critical parts of running a business, not least because it is one of the most complex, involving dozens of companies, hundreds of combinations and permutations, accounting for world events outside of your business, a lot of people hours to figure it all out. Today, a startup called 7bridges that is aiming to simplify that by way of an AI-based automation platform — it ingests a company’s supply chain, operating and logistics data to present a user with optimized recommendations for how to move goods — is announcing $17 million in new funding, a sign of the demand in the market to address and fix how supply chains work.

Eight Roads, the investment firm backed by Fidelity, is leading the round for London-based 7bridges, with Local Globe and enterprise VC Crane, which both invested in 7bridges’ seed round in 2020, are also participating. Shipping behemoth Maersk, by way of its fund Maersk Growth, is also in the round as a strategic backer: Maersk will be working with 7bridges to integrate its logistics and shipping data into 7bridges to help Maersk customers manage their logistics more easily. Valuation is not being disclosed. 7 bridges has raised just over $20 million to date.

This Series A is coming after a strong couple of years of growth for 7bridges, which today provides tools to around 20 large multinational companies. As companies like Amazon have abundantly demonstrated, having a well-run logistics supply chain can be huge competitive edge. Philip Ashton, 7bridges’ CEO who co-founded the company with Matei Beremski (CTO), said that this concept was already driving decent interest for 7bridges. Then Covid-19 happened.

“The pandemic presented a moment of realization for those companies that still had their heads in the sand,” he said. “Having an adaptive supply chain is a business-saving issue.”

The crux of the challenge (and opportunity) that 7bridges is addressing stems both from how supply chain business models have evolved over the years, and also world events. Supply chains and the movement of goods are two extremely fragmented spaces, made even more the case in the last couple of years. Covid-19 completely disrupted how many partners in a company’s supply chain operated (if they continued operating at all).

At the same time, Covid-19 led to massive surges in demand for many businesses — most obviously in areas like e-commerce but also any business that found itself getting squeezed as a result of disruptions elsewhere (eg a pharmaceutical company seeing more orders for drugs in part because others are making less, or just because people became more anxious for their health).

Typically a company might work with upwards of 30 different suppliers in the normal course of business, from those supplying components through to companies that might ship parts or all of your product around the world. Those partners typically will work within their own data silos, and some are far from embarking on their so-called “digital transformation” journeys. That is, there are a surprising number of companies in the wider world of business still using older, analogue, paper-based systems.

All the disruptions and older ways of doing things add up to huge inefficiencies. 7bridges cites data from McKinsey that estimates that 50% of logistics spend goes to waste, falling through the gaps in companies’ models. At the same time, apparently there is an appetite to invest more to fix this: some 85% of supply chain executives said inefficiencies in their current systems were “a cause for concern.”

All of these factors were some of what contributed to Maersk investing. “The last two years have drawn supply chains directly into the commercial spotlight,” said Oliver Finch, investment partner at Maersk Growth, in a statement. “There is an urgent need to innovate in the sector and maintain access to goods we rely on. 7bridges have developed a novel technology solution to digitalise the design, management and optimization of supply chains. 7bridges will enable a wider range of businesses to better harness the power of data and AI to support commercial decision-making. We believe 7bridges has the potential to address a largely unmet market need and significantly improve companies’ supply chains.”

Indeed, with AI and automation making their way into every aspect of how business gets done nowadays, it was a no-brainer that a company would come along to build a platform to bring all of this together.

That’s not to say that others hadn’t tried before, but Beremski and Ashton said that a number of factors meant that efforts didn’t get off the ground: either the timing in the market wasn’t right (a critical mass would not come on board), or the technology still wasn’t there.

“Companies had a crack at this 15 or 20 years ago, but awareness and technology just didn’t match up,” Ashton said.

“Now there are more compute resources, and the level of machine learning, the maturity of the systems and reinforcement learning and mathematical optimization, have really only emerged in the last three or four years,” added Beremski. “Logistics is going through a digital transformation, which means that all the services within it are now available through APIs and are just more accessible.” All that makes building a system like 7bridges’, and getting customers on board, much more of a reality.

It’s also helped that there have been a wave of other tech startups emerging to tackle other aspects of the logistics equation, plotting a course for more evolution in the space. They’ve included the likes of Flexport, Zencargo; a massive wave of last-mile delivery startups; ERP companies like Xentral; and those focusing on digitizing and defragmenting manufacturing capacity such as Xometry. All of these have laid the groundwork for yet more companies to come along and tackle other aspects in the space.

“Almost every shipper is facing significant supply chain challenges from rising costs and a changing regulatory environment, and lack the tools and know-how to navigate them,” said Davor Hebel, managing partner and head of Eight Roads in Europe, in a statement. “7bridges is creating a new category of value optimization software for logistics which has historically only been a service available to the largest shippers from consultants. We are incredibly excited to partner with the 7bridges team as they look to scale the business.”

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7bridges raises $17M to automate logistics supply chains using AI

Supply chain logistics — getting components and eventually finished products from A to B to C — is one of the most critical parts of running a business, not least because it is one of the most complex, involving dozens of companies, hundreds of combinations and permutations, accounting for world events outside of your business, a lot of people hours to figure it all out. Today, a startup called 7bridges that is aiming to simplify that by way of an AI-based automation platform — it ingests a company’s supply chain, operating and logistics data to present a user with optimized recommendations for how to move goods — is announcing $17 million in new funding, a sign of the demand in the market to address and fix how supply chains work.

Eight Roads, the investment firm backed by Fidelity, is leading the round for London-based 7bridges, with Local Globe and enterprise VC Crane, which both invested in 7bridges’ seed round in 2020, are also participating. Shipping behemoth Maersk, by way of its fund Maersk Growth, is also in the round as a strategic backer: Maersk will be working with 7bridges to integrate its logistics and shipping data into 7bridges to help Maersk customers manage their logistics more easily. Valuation is not being disclosed. 7 bridges has raised just over $20 million to date.

This Series A is coming after a strong couple of years of growth for 7bridges, which today provides tools to around 20 large multinational companies. As companies like Amazon have abundantly demonstrated, having a well-run logistics supply chain can be huge competitive edge. Philip Ashton, 7bridges’ CEO who co-founded the company with Matei Beremski (CTO), said that this concept was already driving decent interest for 7bridges. Then Covid-19 happened.

“The pandemic presented a moment of realization for those companies that still had their heads in the sand,” he said. “Having an adaptive supply chain is a business-saving issue.”

The crux of the challenge (and opportunity) that 7bridges is addressing stems both from how supply chain business models have evolved over the years, and also world events. Supply chains and the movement of goods are two extremely fragmented spaces, made even more the case in the last couple of years. Covid-19 completely disrupted how many partners in a company’s supply chain operated (if they continued operating at all).

At the same time, Covid-19 led to massive surges in demand for many businesses — most obviously in areas like e-commerce but also any business that found itself getting squeezed as a result of disruptions elsewhere (eg a pharmaceutical company seeing more orders for drugs in part because others are making less, or just because people became more anxious for their health).

Typically a company might work with upwards of 30 different suppliers in the normal course of business, from those supplying components through to companies that might ship parts or all of your product around the world. Those partners typically will work within their own data silos, and some are far from embarking on their so-called “digital transformation” journeys. That is, there are a surprising number of companies in the wider world of business still using older, analogue, paper-based systems.

All the disruptions and older ways of doing things add up to huge inefficiencies. 7bridges cites data from McKinsey that estimates that 50% of logistics spend goes to waste, falling through the gaps in companies’ models. At the same time, apparently there is an appetite to invest more to fix this: some 85% of supply chain executives said inefficiencies in their current systems were “a cause for concern.”

All of these factors were some of what contributed to Maersk investing. “The last two years have drawn supply chains directly into the commercial spotlight,” said Oliver Finch, investment partner at Maersk Growth, in a statement. “There is an urgent need to innovate in the sector and maintain access to goods we rely on. 7bridges have developed a novel technology solution to digitalise the design, management and optimization of supply chains. 7bridges will enable a wider range of businesses to better harness the power of data and AI to support commercial decision-making. We believe 7bridges has the potential to address a largely unmet market need and significantly improve companies’ supply chains.”

Indeed, with AI and automation making their way into every aspect of how business gets done nowadays, it was a no-brainer that a company would come along to build a platform to bring all of this together.

That’s not to say that others hadn’t tried before, but Beremski and Ashton said that a number of factors meant that efforts didn’t get off the ground: either the timing in the market wasn’t right (a critical mass would not come on board), or the technology still wasn’t there.

“Companies had a crack at this 15 or 20 years ago, but awareness and technology just didn’t match up,” Ashton said.

“Now there are more compute resources, and the level of machine learning, the maturity of the systems and reinforcement learning and mathematical optimization, have really only emerged in the last three or four years,” added Beremski. “Logistics is going through a digital transformation, which means that all the services within it are now available through APIs and are just more accessible.” All that makes building a system like 7bridges’, and getting customers on board, much more of a reality.

It’s also helped that there have been a wave of other tech startups emerging to tackle other aspects of the logistics equation, plotting a course for more evolution in the space. They’ve included the likes of Flexport, Zencargo; a massive wave of last-mile delivery startups; ERP companies like Xentral; and those focusing on digitizing and defragmenting manufacturing capacity such as Xometry. All of these have laid the groundwork for yet more companies to come along and tackle other aspects in the space.

“Almost every shipper is facing significant supply chain challenges from rising costs and a changing regulatory environment, and lack the tools and know-how to navigate them,” said Davor Hebel, managing partner and head of Eight Roads in Europe, in a statement. “7bridges is creating a new category of value optimization software for logistics which has historically only been a service available to the largest shippers from consultants. We are incredibly excited to partner with the 7bridges team as they look to scale the business.”

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HR platform Hibob raises $150M at a $1.65B valuation

On the heels of Personio raising a big round yesterday, one of its competitors and another big startup in the area of HR has also picked up some fundning. Hibob, a London-based company that targets the mid-market with an all-in-one platform that handles various human resources functions, closed a Series C of $150 million. The funding values the company at around $1.65 billion, the company has confirmed to us. This was also the figure that appeared in leaked rumors in the market earlier this week, ahead of the company confirming the news today.

General Atlantic led the round, with past investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, Eight Roads and Entrée Capital among the others investing. Hibob last raised money about 10 months ago, a $70 million round in December 2020 (a round led by SEEK and Israel Growth Partners). Its valuation since then has more than tripled, a mark of how hot the market is for HR right now.

“Hot” and HR are not two terms you might usually hear in the same sentence. The tasks that comprise human resources — in Hibob’s case, tracking attendance, time off, compensation, payroll, benefits and running surveys — are usually seen as some of the more dry, and often overly officious, aspects of working life.

Covid-19 and pandemic working practices — where the vast majority of knowledge workers were sent home for the better part of a year or more (and some of us are still here in our kitchens) — have definitely changed how we interface with work, and so HR systems have suddenly come into their own as a way of tracking things, and even helping us all stay connected.

Hibob, which sells its platform as “Bob”, says that the last year has seen triple-digit growth in revenues, and its opportunity has been to present its product — which also offers collaboration and other tools — as a modern take on what HR can mean to a company.

“Our mission is to modernize HR technology,” Ronni Zehavi, Hibob’s CEO, who co-founded the company with Israel David, told me last December. “We are a people management platform for how people work today. Whether that’s remotely or physically collaborative, our customers face challenges with work. We believe that the HR platforms of the future will not be clunky systems, annoying, giant platforms. We believe it should be different. We are a system of engagement rather than record.”

While the company’s roots are in Israel, its modern HQ is in London with another office in New York. It has 1,500 mid-sized customers operating in 134 countries, but right now it says that some 65% those customers — which include the likes of Ebury Partners Ltd., G.Network, Revolut, and Cazoo — are in the U.K. and other European markets.

The funding will be used in part in an effort to tap more growth internationally to complement that existing base.

The last several years have seen a turn in HR tech that mirrors that of all enterprise IT: the explosion of funding available to startups has bred a plethora of point-solution specialists addressing singular aspects of the larger HR process, whether it is payroll, or benefits, or hiring and onboarding, or surveys and employee satisfaction, or training, or recruiting.

However, the bigger gravitational pull of technology seems to always bring us back to the concept of larger platforms, which are in their own way easier to run and potentially less expensive overall. In HR, those targeting smaller and mid-sized customers like Hibob or Personio also have a precedent in the form of Workday (and more historically companies like SAP).

Personio is an interesting company to consider in comparison to Hibob: it is bigger but also has smaller businesses in its mix of customers. When it announced its funding yesterday at a $6.3 billion valuation, it noted that its next steps would be to go into wider workflow automation, bringing more of the data you capture in HR systems (and specifically Personio’s HR systems) into other applications in a more efficient way.

It will be interesting to see whether Hibob takes a similar route, or if not, how it chooses to evolve its own platform over time. HR, being focused on people management, is in a way is at the heart of how a company runs its whole business, so there are a lot of routes it can take.

“Hibob has created a solution that serves and anticipates the needs of modern, evolving businesses,” said Anton Levy, co-president, MD and global head of tech at General Atlantic, in a statement. “We have tracked the company for years, and positive customer feedback further validates that Hibob’s platform has become a mission-critical component of HR tech stacks. Hibob will mark our sixth investment in an Israel-based company in under two years, signifying our strong conviction in the country’s market. We look forward to supporting the business’ global growth as it redefines employee engagement and HR technology.”

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Owkin raises $25 million as it builds a secure network for healthcare analysis and research

Imagine a model of collaborative research and development among hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, universities and other research institutions where no one shared any actual data.

That’s the dream of the new New York-based startup Owkin, which has raised $25 million in fresh financing from investors including Bpifrance Large Venture, Cathay Innovation and MACSF (the French Pension Fund for Clinicians), alongside previous investors GV, F-Prime Capital and Eight Roads. 

The company’s pitch is that data scientists, clinical doctors, academics and pharmaceutical companies can all log in to the virtual lab that Owkin calls the Owkin Studio.

In that virtual environment, all parties can access anonymized data sets and models exclusively to refine their own research and development and studies to ensure that the most cutting edge insights into novel biomarkers, mechanisms of action and predictive models inform the work that all of the relevant parties are doing.

The ultimate goal, the company said, is to improve patient outcomes.

In its quest to get more companies and institutions to open up and share information — with the promise that the information can’t be extracted or used in a way that isn’t allowed by the owners of the data — Owkin is replicating work that other companies are pursuing in fields ranging from healthcare to financial services and beyond.

The Israeli company Qedit has developed similar technologies for the financial services industry, and Sympatic, a recent graduate from one of the recent batches of Techstars companies, is working on a similar technology for the healthcare industry.

Owkin makes money by enabling remote access to the data sets for pharmaceutical companies and licensing the models developed by universities to those companies. It’s a way for the company to entice researchers to join the platform and provide another revenue stream for research institutions who have seen their funding decline over the last forty years.

“We have a huge loop of academic universities that have access to the data and are developing algorithms and we share data,” said the company’s chief executive Dr. Thomas Clozel. “At the end what it helps is developing better drugs.”

Declines in federal funding for scientific research since the 1980s (Image courtesy of The Conversation)

The investment from Owkin’s new and existing investors takes the company to $55 million in total capital raised through the extension of its Series A round. In all the round totaled $52 million, Clozet said.

“We are exactly where we need to be because it’s about privacy and privacy is more important than ever before,” said Clozet.

The COVID-19 epidemic has emphasized the need for closer collaboration among different corporations and research institutions, and that has also increased demand for the company’s technology. “It touches everything… We have access to the right data sets and centers to build the best models for COVID,” said Clozet. “We’re lucky to have the right traction before the COVID happens and we have the right research that has been done.”

In fact, the company has launched the Covid-19 Open AI Consortium (COAI), and is using its platform to advance collaborative research and accelerate clinical development of effective treatments for patients infected with the coronavirus, the company said.  All of its findings will be shared with the global medical and scientific communities.

The initial focus on the research is on cardiovascular complications in COVID-19 patients in collaboration with CAPACITY, an international registry working with over 50 centers worldwide, the company said. Other areas of research will include patient outcomes and triage, and the prediction and characterization of immune response, according to Owkin.

“Since we first backed Owkin in 2017, we have been sharing its vision to apply AI to fighting one of the most dreadful diseases on earth: cancer,” said Jacky Abitbol, a partner at Cathay Innovation. “Owkin has risen to become a leader in digital health, we are proud to grow our investment in the company to fuel its ambition to pioneer AI for medical research, while preserving patient-privacy and data security.”