On Tuesday, a startup challenging the traditional real-world data industry announced the close of its Series A funding round.
New York-based Novellia raised $18 million, bringing its total funding amount to $28 million. The Series A was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, TMV, Acrew Capital and Bling Capital.
The startup, founded in 2023, operates a patient-permissioned real-world data platform. This platform allows patients to pull together years of medical records from different providers into a single record, as well as choose whether to contribute anonymized data for pharmaceutical research, explained CEO Shashi Shankar.
Before co-founding Novellia with Chief Technology Officer Elliot Katz, Shankar spent nearly a decade at Genentech working on real-world data, partnerships and product launches.Toward the end of his tenure there, he became convinced that emerging interoperability rules would eventually give patients easy access to their medical records.
He said he grew increasingly fixated on how to build a more complete, longitudinal view of healthcare journeys than traditional real-world data sources could provide. The idea became personal when Shankar’s grandfather died of gastroesophageal cancer.
Watching his mother coordinate care across multiple providers shined a huge spotlight on how fragmented healthcare data remains — and this inspired him to build a patient-centered platform.
In his eyes, traditional real-world data vendors largely operate the same way: purchasing data from brokers, health systems and other third parties.
Because this data is fragmented and often not directly consented by patients, it’s difficult to create a complete picture of a person’s healthcare story. Novellia was built around the idea that a patient-centered approach could result in more complete datasets, Shankar noted.
With complete datasets, pharma companies can generate more accurate evidence on safety, efficacy and care patterns, he added.
“They can’t actually stitch together a single complete patient story,” Shankar declared. “If you get on the phone with any pharma company, one of the biggest frustrations is: ‘We’re spending $80-100 million a year on real world data, and we have no idea what’s going on.’”
Novellia’s model is different from other real-world data companies because it collects data directly from patients rather than buying it from intermediaries. Shankar said patients can aggregate their records from pretty much any healthcare provider, lab or clinic they’ve visited.
Patients use the platform for free. Novellia generates revenue by providing anonymized insights to pharma companies and diagnostics firms, which they use to inform their R&D efforts.
Shankar said the startup already works with a majority of the top 10 pharma companies. Novellia’s platform helps them better understand safety signals and outcomes in real-world settings, he stated.
For instance, Shankar pointed out that Novellia helped a customer analyze safety concerns surrounding a breast cancer drug, and the platform ended up finding a lower incidence of a suspected adverse event than previously believed.
The startup has contributed to research on care variation as well. It studied biomarker testing patterns and found significant differences between physicians practicing at centers of excellence and those in community settings, Shankar noted.
Data validation is another key use case that he highlighted. By comparing multiple data sources, Novellia has identified physician transcription errors in lab records that other datasets would have missed, he said.
These examples illustrate the value proposition that Novellia is pitching: healthcare data should work first for patients — and this will ultimately give way to better insights for researchers too.
Photo: Maskot, Getty Images
