Elucidata raised $16 million in Series A funding headed by Eight Roads Ventures

• ByStartupStory     |    September 28, 2022

Biotechnology company Elucidata has announced a $16 million Series A funding round. Eight Roads Ventures, an international investment company, led the round, while F-Prime Capital, IvyCap Ventures, and Hyperplane Venture Capital also participated.

According to a company statement, the capital raised will be utilized to accelerate the worldwide development of operations, with a particular focus on deepening product capabilities in the domains of translational drug research and associated markets.

Polly, its data-centric Machine Learning Operations (ML-Ops) platform, is now being used for R&D. Firm R&D teams may make use of this platform to get access to high-quality, human-curated biomolecular data that can be accessed and analyzed through a GUI or automated software.

Over 2.5 million biomolecular datasets have been processed by Polly, which has been employed by numerous industry-leading life sciences businesses. Polly is used by leading pharmaceutical corporations like Genentech, Pfizer, and Janssen, as well as universities and nonprofits like Stanford and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to accelerate the drug development process.

“Organizations often underestimate the importance of data quality, and as a result, a lot of AI/ML initiatives are compromised. We’re on a mission to derisk such initiatives in life sciences R&D by empowering them with high-quality biomedical data at every stage of the R&D process,” said Dr. Abhishek Jha, CEO, and Co-Founder of Elucidata. “The new infusion of capital is a testament to how Polly is creating value for its customers by cleaning and linking data at scale. I am thrilled to have world-class investors at the table as we continue to build a category-defining company.

“Elucidata is providing life science companies access to high-quality datasets and, as a result, effectively accelerating their R&D efforts towards developing innovative solutions that can improve human health,” said Nihal Sinha, MD, Partner at F-Prime Capital.

Life science companies, in Elucidata’s view, will be among the first to fully capitalize on AI’s potential in the near future. This would need rethinking the existing “model-centric” AI narrative, which has been mostly pushed by internet businesses but is inapplicable to specialized fields like health sciences R&D.

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