SHYFT Analytics Files for IPO Following Rapid Expansion and $30 Billion in Client Sales
What is the current state of processing and mining medical big data, and how will it evolve in the future? VCBeat (WeChat: vcbeat) will publish a series of reports on the global medical big data sector, covering typical case studies, investment and financing trends, and industry landscapes, to serve as a reference for investors, entrepreneurs, and healthcare institutions.
Numerous companies operating in the life sciences industry are facing an increasingly complex healthcare landscape, while the broader environment is fundamentally reshaping how medical products are developed and commercialized. Major pharmaceutical companies are striving to create more personalized and market-valuable products, aiming to secure a foothold in this fiercely competitive market. In this context, robust data support becomes particularly crucial throughout the entire process of pharmaceutical product development, target population research, and market launch.
SHYFT Analytics has seized this gap in demand and rapidly expanded. The company, which provides cloud data and cloud analytics services to the global life sciences industry, secured $12.5 million in Series B financing on August 30 this year. SHYFT’s management adopted a fully strategic financing structure: investments came from McKesson Ventures and medical cloud data company Medidata Solutions, while existing investors Health Enterprise Partners and Milestone Venture Partners also continued their participation in this round.
SHYFT Analytics—See What Your Data Can Do
SHYFT was founded in 2006 in Waltham, Massachusetts. The current team consists of five members: Founder and CEO Zackary King; Vice President of Strategic Development, Brian Irwin; Vice President of Customer Research, Frank Lane; Vice President of Sales, Joe Walsh; and Vice President of Product Engineering, Don Nguyen. Other board members include Co-founder John Corcoran; Steve Hirschfeld, Executive Vice President of Medidata Solutions; and David Tamburri, CFO of Health Enterprise Partners, which has invested in SHYFT twice.
SHYFT Analytics Core Team
CEO Zackary King boasts a rich and varied background. Prior to founding SHYFT Analytics, he was an early employee at ZEFER, a software services company that has since grown into an enterprise with annual revenues exceeding $100 million, over 800 employees, and six major office locations. Before joining ZEFER, King served as the leader of the engineering team at EF Education First, the world’s largest private education company. He frequently contributes articles to publications in the healthcare and technology sectors and serves as an advisor and investor to numerous early-stage tech startups. Notably, this founder also earned the Air Force Combat Action Badge and the Army Commendation Medal during the Gulf War. Key terms associated with corporate leader Zackary King include leadership, technology, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and big data.
SHYFT has raised a total of approximately $31.5 million in funding to date, including a $15 million round led by Health Enterprise Partners in December 2013, a $4 million Series A round from Milestone Venture Partners in April 2014, and a $12.5 million Series B round this August.
SHYFT Analytics offers six cloud-based analytics solutions designed to enhance the competitiveness, consumer appeal, and revenue potential of its clients’ products. These six solutions address sales, specialty pharmaceuticals, product launches, rare diseases, market access, and real-world clinical data, with all products accessible via mobile devices.
The official website features six key product areas: Sales, Specialty Pharmaceuticals, Product Launches, Rare Diseases, Market Access, and Clinical Case Studies.
Sales Solutions
SHYFT’s sales solutions provide pharmaceutical sales representatives with timely, accurate, and targeted information, addressing the challenges of slow information updates and information overload. The software seamlessly integrates hundreds of pharmaceutical information sources, analyzing treatment preferences, physician-patient dynamics, and medication behavior patterns to create more sales opportunities for enterprises.
Specialty Drug Solutions
Specialty pharmaceuticals are one of the fastest-growing segments in the current healthcare market, with their global market share projected to steadily reach $236 billion by 2017. By leveraging SHYFT’s rare disease solutions, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies can expand their profit potential in the specialty drug sector. SHYFT utilizes big data to provide clients with insights into the potential patient population for specific conditions, the clinical scenarios in which physicians prescribe specialty medications, and prescribing preferences. Armed with this information, pharmaceutical companies can develop specialty drugs that best align with market demand, thereby increasing sales revenue.
Product Launch Solutions
Product launch is the most critical step in the product lifecycle, and a successful launch requires the rapid integration of accurate market information to make informed decisions. SHYFT’s product solutions enable pharmaceutical companies to monitor KPI achievement for relevant products across various regions at the terminal level, assist in product positioning, and provide real-time updates on market information.
Rare Disease Solutions
There are 6,800 identified rare diseases worldwide. By 2018, orphan drugs prescribed globally accounted for 16% of total prescription drug expenditures. SHYFT’s rare disease solution leverages existing case data to identify and diagnose patients with rare diseases. Its patient management and case management functionalities provide multidimensional data on disease monitoring and treatment, facilitate effective collaboration between patients and care teams, and drive sales growth of orphan drugs.
Market Access Solutions
This feature, equivalent to market analysis, helps companies identify target consumer segments for their products and provides economic data from the pharmaceutical market. It enables marketing professionals to gain a strategic advantage in intelligence gathering efficiently—saving both time and money—and collaborate with sales teams to develop market plans.
Clinical Case Solutions
The SHYFT platform possesses comprehensive big data spanning the medical and commercial sectors, enabling clinical data to be appropriately leveraged in medical research, industry development, and business activities. This patient-centric approach to data analysis helps practitioners better understand patients’ unspoken needs, guiding product improvements focused on enhancing patient care and significantly boosting product satisfaction. Drawing from diverse sources—including electronic health records (EHRs), electronic medical records (EMRs), insurance claims, hospital reports, clinical trials, and patient registries—the platform can tailor data insights to meet the specific needs of different institutions.
SHYFT Analytics’ large-scale pharmaceutical cloud platform is divided into two parts:Cloud Data Management Platform, Cloud Analytics Platform. The platforms are all certified under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and can be used on PCs and mobile devices.
On the cloud data management platform, SHYFT provides the latest healthcare industry models. Enterprises need only input essential data and information, thereby eliminating irrelevant data that could impair decision-making and reducing manual processing efforts. In short, the cloud data management platform effortlessly and accurately integrates various effective clinical and commercial information within the pharmaceutical industry.
On the cloud analytics platform, the software not only analyzes clinical medication practices from the perspective of prescription behavior but also examines market dynamics from a commercial pharmaceutical standpoint. The resulting insights enable companies to formulate appropriate business strategies. Powered by robust algorithms, the software extracts actionable data from extensive repositories—including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, web portals, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and clinical case databases—to serve as the foundation for data analysis. Additionally, it facilitates multi-dimensional comparisons between the company’s products and competing offerings in the market.
Since 2010, SHYFT Analytics has been progressively building a healthcare analytics service platform. The platform integrates all aspects involved in the research and development of new medical products—including medical expertise, commercial domains, competitive landscape, and market access—and leverages the company’s professional and reliable data sources to provide rich information for cross-functional collaboration and decision-making.
As the SHYFT platform holds a vast amount of data related to the life sciences sector, it served as an industry case provider in 2015, assisting Gartner, Inc. in establishing the 2015 “Hype Cycle” model for the life sciences industry. “Our technology aggregates both clinical and commercial data, transforming it into unique business insights and industry analysis. This provides sufficient information to support decision-making for life sciences enterprises, enabling them to successfully transition into value-based healthcare service providers,” said Brian Irwin, Vice President. “Gartner’s selection of us to provide data for this report will further validate the value of our platform’s data in the eyes of more customers.”
2015 was a landmark year for SHYFT Analytics. During this period, SHYFT secured two major clients from the top ten global pharmaceutical companies—Shire Pharmaceuticals and Johnson & Johnson—achieving a 300% year-over-year market growth. The company expanded its Boston operations and established a new branch in California. Other notable collaborators included Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Astellas Pharma, and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, the largest pharmaceutical enterprise in Asia. Today, SHYFT’s clientele spans emerging areas of healthcare, with a focus on oncology, cardiovascular diseases, and treatments for rare and specialized conditions. It is fair to say that SHYFT Analytics’ cloud data and analytics services have significantly broadened the business horizons of life sciences companies.
The SHYFT RWE platform, a recently launched feature by the company, is a healthcare solution that integrates electronic health records (EHRs), global clinical outcomes, and analytical case studies. With the refinement of this capability, SHYFT can now significantly optimize the efficiency of large-scale medical observational studies. In one instance, SHYFT users can leverage SHYFT RWE to conduct point-to-point patient-disease studies, reducing processes that previously took months—such as drug safety assessments, comparative efficacy analyses, drug utilization reviews, treatment pathway evaluations, and patient outcome workflow analyses—to just a few days.
Evidence shows that the SHYFT platform has achieved the following results: $30 billion in total user sales; an average of 2,000 feedback reports per month from large enterprises, third parties, and specialized clients; and an average of 5,000 personalized analyses provided to users daily.
SHYFT Platform Achieves Significant Results
“Many companies in the life sciences sector are rapidly adopting data analytics approaches to enhance the commercial efficiency of their products or improve the efficacy of drugs under development,” said Dave Schulte, General Manager of McKesson Ventures, one of the investors. “SHYFT’s cloud data platform provides essential infrastructure for data management, information integration, and data visualization to numerous leading companies. Its remarkable growth rate and strong customer demand have propelled SHYFT to a leadership position in the healthcare cloud data market. In particular, SHYFT has demonstrated strong performance in real-world evidence analysis within the pharmaceutical industry.”
Series Report:
[Medical Big Data] Zephyr Health: Market Insight Consultant for Pharmaceutical Companies