Just 17 months after emerging from stealth, two-time entrepreneur and former Y Combinator partner Surbhi Sarna has raised $95 million for Collate, which developed AI tools to automate life sciences paperwork, at a valuation approaching $1 billion, according to Forbes.
Redpoint Ventures led the deal, which brings Collate’s total funding to date to $125 million.
The latest funding announcement comes just 10 months after Collate acquired MantleBio to accelerate the development of its AI-first life sciences paperwork automation platform.
The paperwork in life sciences is both tedious and staggering. Some regulatory submissions can run to 10,000 pages, for example, including an amount of clinical data that AI can parse faster than any human being possibly could.
Surbhi Sarna says that Collate is seeing time savings of 50% to 90%, and that a document that might have taken seven months previously may now be able to be completed in a month or less. That’s critical in an industry where the paperwork for clinical trials and regulatory filings is a bottleneck in bringing new therapies to market.
While errors and hallucinations are an issue for AI, she says that Collate’s accuracy is above 90% and often closer to 97%, and that as a safeguard, the company requires human verification of documents before they’re exported from its system.
Surbhi Sarna now believes that in the next six to nine months, the majority of the world’s life sciences companies are going to sign deals to use AI for all this paperwork, whether with Collate or with someone else. “It’s bananas,” she says of the customer interest and potential growth trajectory. “If you are a founder worth your salt, you are never going to say no. You and your team are going to figure it out.”
Clinical documentation and compliance companies have secured billions of dollars in funding, according to our recent Funding Database. More recently, LighthouseAI, a provider of a central intelligence and management platform for pharmaceutical state licensing and compliance, raised an $8 million in a Series A funding round led by Boxcars Ventures, with participation from TGVP and existing investors.
In another deal, Keebler Health, a clinical documentation startup, raised $16 million in a Series A funding round to accelerate commercial growth in the U.S. Including the recent Series A round, Keebler Health has raised $23 million to date.