Clinical trial software company Reify hits $2.2B valuation


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As the Covid-19 pandemic led more companies to turn to decentralized clinical trials, investors are pouring funding into a software firm that is looking to streamline these processes. Reify Health recently raised $220 million in a series C funding round led by tech-focused investment firm Coatue Management, giving it a valuation of $2.2 billion.

The Boston-based company was founded in 2012, with the goals of making it easier to enroll patients in trials, and expanding access through more sites. 

“What we’re doing, and the future of clinical trials overall, goes beyond decentralized trials,” Reify Executive Chairman Michael Lin said in a news release. “We need to have a global healthcare system proactively reaching out to patients everywhere and mobilizing the resources necessary to bring trials to them.”

Reify’s business is divided into two parts: StudyTeam, its patient enrollment management platform, and Care Access Research, its subsidiary for decentralized clinical trials. 

So far, StudyTeam has won over business from several large biopharma companies, including Amgen, AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly & Company, and is used across 4,000 clinical trial sites, according to the company. The software helps biopharma companies see how they can enroll faster, avoiding the “sit and wait” problem, where it can be time consuming to enroll enough patients with few available trial sites. It also pares down redundant tasks, such as research staff manually copying enrollment information from their systems into clinical trial sponsors’ logs. 

“Early on, we spent a number of years trying to understand this question: why is clinical research still such a devastating bottleneck on drug development?” Reify CEO Ralph Passarella, said in a news release. “It was painfully obvious that slow, unpredictable patient enrollment was at the heart of the problem. If we want to consistently enroll trials in three to four months instead of 18 months, there are two key things we must achieve. First, we must be able to rapidly identify enough interested patients. Second, we have to make it feasible for those patients to participate in the relevant trial.”

Reify’s other business, Care Access, is meant to help with the latter problem. It has built more than 60 trial sites since 2015. Care Access CEO Ahman Namvargolian said it also started using mobile site vehicles to bring trials to more locations across the U.S., and soon in additional countries. 

Reify plans to use the new funds to grow both businesses, after raising $30 million last year. 

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