Bootstrapped since 2008, Evidence Partners closes $20M to tackle automated literature review
Summary
With the round, the company aims to build on the uptick in demand it has seen for its artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled platform during the pandemic. Evidence Partners currently serves over 300 research organizations, and claims to cater to more than 60 percent of the worlds largest pharma and medical device companies.When the pandemic hit, academics, health agencies, and other organizations turned to Evidence Partners software to automate the traditionally manual labour-intensive literature review process amid a developing global health crisis.But according to Evidence Partners co-founder and CEO Peter OBlenis, the firms software has applications in just about any literature processing capacity, within both its current customer base and new markets.We still see tremendous opportunity out there and we need scale to be able to address that market, OBlenis told BetaKit in an interview. Theres a lot of greenfield out there in our existing markets Were barely scratching the surface, I would say, with some of those businesses.Evidence Partners all-equity round, which closed in mid-July, was led by San Franciscos Thomvest Ventures with participation from Vancouver-based Pender Ventures and Export Development Canada.The funding consisted of a combination of primary and secondary capitalthe latter of which went solely to Evidence Partners founders. OBlenis and Thomvest partner Andrew Pinkerton declined to disclose the exact breakdown of primary and secondary capital.Evidence Partners was founded in 2008 by OBlenis, former CTO Ian Stefanison, and ex-chairman Jonathan Barker, who OBlenis said both left the company last month of their own accordBarker to retire and Stefanison to pursue other interests.Back then, the trio was working at TrialStat, building software to manage clinical patient data during drug trials, when they discovered some of the companys customers were struggling with the complex and challenging literature review process.OBlenis claims that Evidence Partnerswhich had been bootstrapped up to this point and benefitted from some federal government supportbecame profitable early on in 2009, and has grown every year since then, but declined to disclose further financial details.Pinkerton, who is joining Evidence Partners board of directors as part of this round, noted that part of what attracted Thomvest to Evidence Partners was the companys scrappiness and capital efficiency.Particularly after whats happened in the last nine months in the market, a company thats been bootstrapped and cashflow positive its entire existence but managed to grow fairly quickly every yearthats an attractive opportunity for any investor, said Pinkerton.This conservative approach to spending capital has prevented Evidence Partners from needing to freeze hiring or make any layoffs during the market downturn, said OBlenis, who added that he does not anticipate that any job cuts will be in the cards in the near future.Its a little bit of a contrast to what youre hearing with other companies [right now], and because of the history of running the company very efficiently, they havent gotten ahead of themselves like maybe some other companies, unfortunately, have, Pinkerton added.Initially, Evidence Partners was a small, self-funded business run by Barker and Stefanison while OBlenis worked other jobs full-time. The pandemic was interesting for us because we sell a tool that allows epidemiologists and medical research to happen faster and safer, said OBlenis.The companys offering automatically sorts through vast amounts of medical research files and aggregates the most relevant studies in a fraction of the time that it would take a person to do so manually.Pender Ventures managing partner Maria Pacella, who is joining Evidence Partners board alongside Pinkerton, sees an over $1.2 billion serviceable market opportunity for Evidence Partners in the medical device, pharma, government agency, contract research organization (CRO), and academic spaces.With the explosion of data from [the] increased amount of scientific papers being produced, the acceptance and broader adoption by the scientific community of new methods to do literature reviews [such as using AI], and the increased regulatory complexity and scrutiny the market is primed for Evidence Partners product, Pacella told BetaKit.Pender Ventures was also attracted to Evidence Partners diversified, global, blue-chip customer base, which ranges from top medical device and pharma companies to CROs and government agencies across North America and Europe.Evidence Partners plans to use the capital to support its global expansion efforts and grow its 80-person team by hiring for product, engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success roles.From a sector standpoint, Evidence Partners number one focus for the time being is the medical device space.