TetraScience raises $80M to help life sciences companies analyze data

TetraScience, an R&D cloud data management company focused on life sciences and drug discovery, today announced that it raised $80 million in a series B round co-led by Insight Partners and Alkeon Capital. The company says that the funding will allow it to ramp up its go-to-market efforts, expand its technical capabilities, and double the size of its team.

The pandemic underscores the need to accelerate scientific discovery toward delivering treatments that improve human life. This arguably starts with enabling breakthroughs in biopharma R&D, where some labs remain dependent upon legacy software and data stacks, resulting in bottlenecks. Fewer than 12% of all drugs entering clinical trials end up in pharmacies, and it takes at least 10 years for medicines to complete the journey from discovery to the marketplace.

TetraScience, which was founded by former Harvard and MIT researchers, offers cloud storage, an API, and prebuilt integrations with lab instruments, informatics applications, analytics, and data science partners that pull in and reconcile data. TetraScience can automatically harmonize information across vendors and formats and enable users to share data, reports, analyses, and apps with internal teams.

TetraScience offers tools for prototyping, building, testing, and scaling distributed data apps. A growing number of bundled apps are available from TetraScience as well as its network partners, and the platform natively supports data science tools, templates, models, pipelines, and custom configurations.

A growing market

As data and tools become more readily available, life sciences organizations will tap the technologies necessary to boost their output, some experts predict. For example, an IDC report anticipates that this year, 50% of pharmaceutical and biotech companies will use analytics or AI with IoT data to optimize the supply chain. The report also projects that 30% of life science organizations will have achieved data excellence by 2022.

“COVID-19 has heightened the urgency to replatform to the cloud to take advantage of advanced data science and AI and machine learning as pharmaceutical companies face enormous societal, governmental, and shareholder pressure to radically accelerate discovery,” CEO Patrick Grady told VentureBeat via email. “Inbound interest in the Tetra R&D data cloud from global pharmaceutical companies has increased dramatically, despite very little investment in marketing.”

For one customer — the Johnson Research Group at the MIT Department of Chemistry — TetraScience deployed its product with equipment types within a lab, including freezers and chemical fume hoods. Previously, the lab lacked control over nanoparticle synthesis reaction parameters including temperature monitoring, the ability to turn off a hot plate, and remote syringe pump activation. Now, scientists at the lab can see whether a batch is good based on how much the temperature fluctuated during the synthesis, eliminating the need for manual analysis.

Sixty-one-employee TetraScience’s funding comes on the heels of the company’s 10-times revenue growth 1,000% uptick in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2020, reflecting additions to its customer base like Novo Nordisk, Merck & Co., and SmartLabs. (ARR is forecast to grow more than 300% in 2021, TetraScience says.) It brings the Boston-based company’s total raised to over $88 million following an $8 million series A in October 2019.