Pangaea Data has raised its second funding round in 12 months, following a year of growth and successful deployment of its product for scientists and clinicians at global pharmaceutical companies and healthcare organisations in the UK and US.
The investment was led by deep tech VC firm IQ Capital, who are following on from the previous funding round alongside leading UK venture firm Hambro Perks. New investors in this round include Ascension Ventures and high-profile private investors from the pharmaceutical industry including Sir Peter Job, Mr. John Taysom, Dr. Thomas Dyrberg, Mr. Arthur Chen and Dr. Jonathan Milner.
Pangaea's Intelligence Extractor (PIE) is based on its proprietary unsupervised AI, which helps its customers in the biopharmaceutical and healthcare industry extract intelligence such as phenotypes (clinical characteristics and symptoms) from doctors’ notes, discharge summaries and other textual data, which comprises 80% of a patient’s electronic health record. This is critical for detecting patients at risk of diseases, finding genes linked to a phenotype in the context of drug or biomarker discovery, recruiting patients for clinical trials and matching the right patients with the right drugs.
PIE reduces the bias observed in supervised approaches and requires significantly less data. Unlike other solutions that operate as black boxes, Pangaea’s work is publicly validated by leading third party clinicians and scientists. Through peer reviewed publications in high impact journals, PIE has demonstrated that it is able to extract intelligence at 50x speed with 87.5% accuracy, which is 30% higher than alternative methodologies such as rule based natural language processing (NLP), keyword extraction and manual means. PIE’s federated framework allows its customers to apply it across multiple data sources while complying with privacy regulations and to find 10x more suitable patients at scale, saving 6-12 months. This increased productivity for end users has led to a significant return on their investment.
This investment will be used to make strategic hires to the technical and commercial teams, increasing the capacity for client delivery and further expanding the company’s presence in the US, from its existing base in San Francisco. It will also facilitate further development of the product for new use cases in the biopharmaceutical industry, such as extracting adverse events from social media, medical blogs and patient reported narratives for pharmacovigilance purposes.
Vibhor Gupta, CEO of Pangaea Data said: “This latest round of investment is a great recognition of our customers’ success through our breakthrough AI and a product focused approach. With our existing investors reaffirming their support of the company and new investors with vast experience in the life sciences industry coming on board, we are on course to achieve our core mission of improving patient outcomes through a highly profitable and sustainable business model. In the past 12 months, the company has grown 15 times through the successful deployment of PIE in the biopharmaceutical industry, partnerships with healthcare data providers and significant contributions to peer review publications, which demonstrates that we are leading in this sector. This funding will accelerate this success by providing the resources to strengthen the team, explore new use cases, and expand into new markets.”
Ed Stacey, partner at IQ Capital added: “The team at Pangaea Data have built on a foundation of academic research in the field of unsupervised AI and have demonstrated the value of its application in understanding and extracting actionable intelligence from patient data. There are countless use cases for this technology, which unlocks the patient data that was previously inaccessible without a vast amount of manual effort or less accurate approaches. This is an incredibly valuable proposition for the pharmaceutical industry and is already having an impact on patient outcomes.”
