New $30M Series B Helps Reify Health Power Clinical Trials

Reify Health, which connects biopharma and research site workflows, raised a $30 million round of Series B funding to advance its cloud-based tools for the clinical trial ecosystem.

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Battery Ventures led the round, which included existing investors Sierra Ventures and Asset Management Ventures. With this new round, Reify has raised just under $40 million since forming in 2012, including a $7 million Series A in 2018, co-founder and executive chairman Michael Lin told Crunchbase News.

Boston-based Reify developed its platform, StudyTeam, four years ago to upgrade the systems health care staff at clinical research sites depend on to run trials, allowing them to reduce their workload and accelerate clinical trial enrollment.

“We observed that people doing the work didn’t have the software to get their job done,” co-founder and CEO Ralph Passarella said in an interview. “Spreadsheets, paper and sticky notes were the internal tracking system.”

Some $4 billion is spent annually on clinical trials, but a small amount goes toward the staff working on it, Lin said. Reify’s idea was to bring better tools to the front-line workers to shorten the timelines to recruiting patients while providing a consistent experience at research sites around the world, he added.

More than 1,800 research sites in 26 countries are already using Reify’s product, but the new funding will help the company continue toward its goals started two years ago after the Series A round: Rolling out new features for the StudyTeam enrollment solution, product innovation and global expansion.

“We see the problems day in and day out that research staff have at hospitals and clinics, and pharma wants to work with them, too,” Lin said. “Earlier this year, we saw the opportunity to hit the gas and sought additional investment.”

In terms of growth, the company has 80 employees, and Lin expects to double that in the next 12 to 18 months. He did not disclose revenue, but said it is growing proportionately to increased adoption.

Reify Health has 10 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies signed on as clients and is in various stages of bringing on the other 10, Passarella said. The company’s next steps also include scaling the platform for better recruitment and enrollment, and adding new product functionalities.

As part of the investment, Neeraj Agrawal, general partner at Battery Ventures, will join Reify’s board of directors, according to Lin. Agrawal said in a written statement that health care staff often have a lot of tools pushed their way, but StudyTeam has been so welcomed by clinical research sites that they are encouraging others to use it.

“This results in a high level of product ‘stickiness’ that creates unprecedented insights for sponsors and underlies the value of the platform to the entire ecosystem,” he added.

Illustration: Dom Guzman