Pharma Analytics Firm Bigfinite Raises $8.5 Million

Until this week, pharma analytics firm Bigfinite only had $125,000 in publicly-reported funding. Today, it announced that it had raised $8.5 million in a seed round.

Pep Gubau, who helped found the company in 2013 and serves as its CEO, said that 70% of pharma manufacturing data is never used. The company also claims that manufacturing inefficiencies cost the pharmaceutical industry $50 billion every year in waste. The team developed an analytics platform called Bigengine in response.

Bigengine is meant to crunch that unused data to optimize the drug manufacturing process. Its capabilities range from predictive equipment maintenance and cleaning recommendations to policy compliance and quality control functions, all offered on a real-time interface.

“The algorithms used by the platform to find relationships between data, combined with the power of the big data analytics and AI, enable our customers to discover new optimization paths,” the company’s site says of Bigengine. The software and data are hosted on the cloud, and the technology was patented in 2016.

Gubau said that Bigengine can potentially yield return on investment in 6 months. With the massive expense that new drug development presents—often in excess of $2 billion dollars per therapy—reductions in cost and inefficiency could be appealing to investors. Financing was led by Crosslink Capital, Uncork Capital, and La Famiglia. Industry Ventures and Krohne also participated.

"The pharma manufacturing process is complex, lengthy, and expensive," Omar El-Ayat, a partner at Crosslink Capital, said in a statement. "Before launching Bigfinite, [the founders] had already successfully built two pharmaceutical IT companies for statistical control and regulatory compliance, both of which were acquired by global corporations."

El-Ayat and Andy McLoughlin of Uncork Capital will join Bigfinite’s Board of Directors.

Bigfinite has offices in San Francisco, California and Barcelona, Spain, and currently has less than 3 dozen employees. According to its official statement, it is looking to double in size by the end of Q2 2018.