Savana raises $25M to expand its Real World Evidence presence into the drug discovery space
April 4, 2022
Europe
- Savana develops and applies AI technologies to unlock value from clinical data (like medical records and clinical trials), making clinical research faster and more powerful
- This new funding will enable Savana to accentuate its leadership in improving medical knowledge and moving towards predictive healthcare and enter the drugs research and development space while also consolidating its footprint in America and Western Europe
- As part of this round GED Capital, Knuru Capital and Aldea Ventures are joining the company while Savana’s early backers, Cathay Innovation and Seaya Ventures are continuing to back the company
Madrid, April 5th, 2022. Savana, a global medical company developing innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to unlock the clinical value embedded in clinical data (like Electronic Medical Records and clinical trials), has successfully closed a $25M funding round. The financing was participated by Conexo Ventures, along with Knuru Capital and Aldea Ventures, and counted on reinvestments from existing investors Seaya Ventures and Cathay Innovation.
Savana is a Madrid-based health tech startup using AI to provide medical knowledge based on “Real World Evidence” to enhance research and build predictive models to enhance patients’ lives. The company provides doctors with life-saving insights by unlocking the critical information buried within the free text of clinical notes, which can then be analyzed jointly with systems biology information, allowing hospitals to optimize the research and development of new drugs.
“Real World Data,” routinely stored data in hospitals, have become extremely valuable to improve clinical trials as AI and big data algorithms can be used to infer knowledge, or “Real World Evidence,” from this wealth of largely unstructured and siloed information previously not accessible.
The pharmaceutical industry is therefore shifting increasingly towards Real World Evidence (RWE) as complement to clinical trials. By leveraging existing databases filled out routinely in hospitals, experts are able to increase the efficiency of drugs by better targeting patients, finding biomarkers, accelerate delivery of molecules to the market, test their hypotheses, and repurpose molecules.
Launched in Spain in 2014 and present in 16 countries across Western Europe and the Americas, Savana’s pioneering technologies have enabled more than 200 hospitals extract insights from over 2 billion medical records, thus creating one of the widest clinical AI networks, boosting clinical practice research and providing the health sector with ground-breaking Artificial Intelligence capabilities.
Today, 22 of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies in the world use Savana’s technologies to make clinical research faster and more accurate through unique evidence generation capabilities, covering 5 languages. Ranging areas from Onco-immunology to chronic diseases as a dedicated clinical research partner, Savana aims to empower medical knowledge around the world, while contributing to the transition towards data-driven predictive healthcare and ensuring that patient data remains secure and confidential.
As big data becomes a top priority among public health and regulatory institutions, Savana will leverage this $25 million fundraising to increase its data analysis capabilities, to include new data layers (genomics, biomolecular data or images), and also to tackle new sources of information (as those generated during clinical trials). By merging all those with the clinical data extracted from EMRs and its proven scientific methodology, their insights promise to accelerate time to market of new drugs through the discovery of biomarkers. At the same time, they will grow its research network through partnerships with first-class research sites. With this new round, Savana takes a huge step forward and enters the drugs R&D space whilst consolidating its presence in America and Western Europe with further investments and recruitments.
Savana already benefits from a multidisciplinary team of 100 professionals (clinicians, data scientists, computer programmers, medical writers, biostatisticians, epidemiologists, engineers, etc.) that will be expanded to continue helping healthcare leaders to make data-driven, critical decisions more quickly to create individualized treatment plans, provide a holistic view of patients, advance medical research and ultimately enhance health outcomes.
Jorge Tello, Savana’s CEO and co-founder, comments: “After 7 years, our vision of reinventing the way clinical research is done has become a reality; we have created the concept and processes to generate evidence through AI applied to medical records. Now it’s time to bring our capabilities into the R&D space, while expanding our services across the geographies in which we operate.”
Antonio Gimenez de Cordoba, Partner at Seaya Ventures, says: “We are impressed with Savana’s work since we first invested in 2018. They are really being able to land the vision of AI-based Medicine into the healthcare market; their ability to align the healthcare providers needs with those of the pharmaceutical companies, generating a double-sided network effect, is truly unique. The talent, passion and values of the team make us even more excited to continue to support this exceptional company, and to take their technology and their brand to the next level.”
Jacky Abitbol, Managing Partner at Cathay Innovation, continues: “Cathay Innovation invests across industries in the startups at the center of the digital revolution, in entrepreneurs that can create a positive impact in their fields, communities and society as a whole. Digitalization is transforming the whole healthcare sector, from optimizing drug development to digital therapy and including care delivery. Savana’s high-tech solutions leverage the largest real word evidence database to bring about such progress. We are proud to support this mission and to renew our trust in this talented team.”
Joaquím Hierro Lopes, as Managing Partner of Conexo Ventures, says: “With this new investment at the intersection of AI and clinical research evidence, GED doubles down its commitment to the healthcare sector through its VC fund Conexo Ventures, to support Savana’s technology and the excellent management team in its ambitious growth and international expansion plan”.
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About Savana
SAVANA is a private scientific company that uses Artificial Intelligence to transform the data in medical records into reusable information. Leveraging the biggest existing medical AI network, Savana uses EHRead®, a medical language engine developed in-house for reusing both the structured and the unstructured information in digital medical records, curating data across sites and countries, thus offering the industry the most realistic databases seen to date. On top of this proprietary technology, it runs machine learning analysis aimed to provide Real World Evidence and predictive algorithms for healthcare. https://www.savanamed.com/
More information
About Cathay Innovation
Cathay Innovation is a global venture capital partnership, created in affiliation with Cathay Capital, investing in startups at the center of the digital revolution across North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Its global platform unifies technology investment across continents, investors, entrepreneurs and leading corporations to accelerate startup growth with access to new markets, invaluable industry knowledge and introductions to potential partners from the start. As a multistage fund with over $1.5 billion assets under management and offices across San Francisco, New York, Paris, Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore, Cathay Innovation partners with visionary entrepreneurs and startups positively impacting the world through technology.
To learn more, please visit www.cathayinnovation.com or follow us on Twitter @Cathayinnov.
For more information
Léa Schultz
Tel : +33 7 57 52 06 05
Yoann Besse
Tel: +33 6 63 03 84 91