Saama Technologies secured a $430 million investment from the Carlyle Group and venture funds from some of the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest companies.
Saama Technologies, which partnered with Pfizer last year to speed up clinical trials for its COVID-19 vaccine through the power of artificial intelligence, secured a $430 million investment from the Carlyle Group and venture funds from some of the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest companies.
Dozens of pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms use Saama’s intelligent Life Sciences Analytics Cloud. For Pfizer, the use of Saama’s platform allowed the company to swiftly conduct its review of the trial data and allowed the company to move forward with its clinical programs. As Forbes reported, the use of Saama’s AI program shaved about one month off Pfizer’s research time. And in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, time was of the essence.
Saama’s program is an end-to-end platform that provides a unified approach to clinical trial data management and analytics. The AI platform can quickly learn and decipher complex clinical data patterns. It can then provide researchers with predictive insights to accelerate the clinical research process across various domains and therapeutic areas.
In an announcement, Carlyle Group said its investment, which provides that global investment firm a significant stake in Saama, is expected to allow the company to accelerate its strategic initiatives. This will allow Saama to expand its go-to-market capabilities and further investment in AI research and development.
Suresh Katta, founder and chief executive officer of Saama, said the life sciences industry is seeing a significant shift in strategic approaches to accelerating drug development, largely spurred by the necessities of the COVID-19 pandemic. Katta noted that AI solutions like those offered by Saama are at the forefront of this revolution in clinical data management.
“These solutions’ role in successfully enabling the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines and therapies to patients in mere months was the litmus test for the future of drug development,” Katta said in a statement.
Katta added that the investment from the Carlyle Group, as well as support from multiple venture arms of pharma companies, “reflects the value they see in Saama’s leadership of this new era and the promise offered by our state-of-the-art solutions.”
In addition to Carlyle, other investors in Saame include Amgen Ventures, Intermountain Ventures, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, McKesson Ventures, Northpond Ventures, Pfizer Ventures, and Population Health Partners.
“AI-driven analytics solutions are transforming the way that data is managed and therefore the way that work is done. We believe Saama can play a key role in that transformation for the life sciences industry,” Ashley Evans, a managing director specializing in technology at Carlyle said in a statement. “As the convergence of healthcare and technology reaches an inflection point, we are excited to help Saama capture the compelling market opportunity ahead.”
David Rubin, Ph.D., managing director at Merck GHI, said the company sees tremendous opportunity in Saama’s AI platform and its mission to accelerate clinical trials.
“It is very exciting to be part of a world-class investment syndicate with such deep healthcare domain expertise and interest in supporting the build of scaled resources that have the potential to change the way clinical research and development is conducted,” Rubin said in a statement.
