$8 million seed investment round turbocharges IgniteData’s growth

IgniteData, the health tech innovator revolutionizing access to regulatory-grade EHR data for clinical trials, has successfully closed its fully subscribed $8 million seed round. This round was led by Springtide, who has joined the IgniteData board alongside existing strategic investor, ZS. Springtide’s co-investors are Oncology Ventures and Frank Naeymi-Rad, co-founder of Intelligent Medical Objects, Inc. and a Chairman of Leap of Faith Technologies. In addition to the new coalition of investors, IgniteData received further backing from Innovate UK in the form of an additional grant and R&D loan. The funding will enhance IgniteData’s ability to scale at an accelerated pace to meet growing demand from leading research sites and sponsors, while expanding the company’s product suite.

System agnostic and scalable by design, IgniteData’s EHR-to-EDC data transfer platform, Archer, has been purpose-built to solve the clinical trial data interoperability challenge. Over 70%¹ of the data required for clinical trials is manually duplicated between site and the sponsor databases, a notoriously time-consuming process with a high error rate: in fact, re-entering data accounts for around 20% of total study costs. Archer’s proprietary mapping engine ensures the immediate retrieval of relevant data from clinical records and the instant transformation of this data into the format required by the study. Populating the sponsor’s data capture system using Archer eliminates data discrepancies, while effectively removing the burden of data verification and query checking. Clinical research coordinators can select, review, and transfer EHR regulatory-grade data to the clinical trial database in moments, today yielding a cost saving of $15,000 per patient in a typical oncology trial.²

“Research sites and sponsors worldwide are urgently seeking technology to bring economies of scale to clinical research data management while overcoming challenges of interoperability, access and compliance and security,” said Ryan Morley, partner at SpringTide and board member at IgniteData. “As a vendor-neutral platform, IgniteData seamlessly integrates into the workflows of clinical research coordinators and aligns with the needs of their pharmaceutical partners — speeding up drug development timelines while reducing costs. Central to turning this vision into reality is CEO Zach Taft, whose proven expertise in scaling digital health technologies is invaluable.”

The seed round has seen industry expert Zach Taft, co-founder of MSK’s Clinical Research Innovation Consortium (CRIC), become CEO. Taft will build on the company’s successes, such as its ground-breaking Innovation Hub collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), and oversee the exponential expansion of its customer base, including major sponsors and leading international research sites.

“It is my absolute privilege to lead the IgniteData team at such a pivotal moment,” said Zach Taft, “Archer has shown that there is a product/market fit and an industry-wide demand for automating the management of clinical research data from sites to sponsors.  This funding and our partnership with our new and existing investors allow us to expand on the opportunity of making clinical trials available, at scale, to researchers, clinicians, and patients across the globe.” he concluded.