In the United States, it takes an average of 12 years for an experimental drug to travel from the laboratory to your medicine cabinet. There are lots of good reasons for this, particularly the FDA regulations that are designed to protect patients, but there are other more mundane factors at play. Many pharma and medical device companies struggle with the same challenges to ship product that an Internet startup does, such as recruiting and retaining the right talent. In fact, it’s estimated that for every drug or medical device that comes to market, 3 months could have been saved if the company was able to access the right talent at the right time.
This is why we’re so excited to announce our early investment in Clora and that today they’ve raised $3.3M in seed funding led by Spark Capital.
Clora’s mission is to organize the world’s life science, medical device, and pharma expertise in order to accelerate development. Specifically, the company makes the process of finding and hiring specialized talent dramatically more efficient by combining decades of experience recruiting and hiring professionals in this industry, as well as interesting new data-driven approaches to job matching algorithms.
Like many other industries in which the workforce is becoming more mobile and demanding more flexible work arrangements, many of the most talented professionals in the pharma, medical device, and life sciences sectors are becoming freelancers or consultants. Clora enables (and rewards) these shifts in the labor pool, and makes it dramatically easier for companies in the space to find and hire highly skilled talent, particularly the long tail of pharma and life sciences companies.
Rahul and the rest of the founding team at Clora combine just the right amount of industry experience as well as fresh technical thinking about how to leverage new data sets to solve this problem. How big is the opportunity? Well, if Clora can speed up the development of a single drug by just 1 month on average, we estimate that represents approximately $50M in savings per drug, not to mention all of the lives improved and saved along the way. We think that’s a goal worth striving for.
