Teckro Inc., a software company aiming to improve to the efficiency of conducting clinical trials and make them more collaborative, has confirmed that it has completed a $25 million Series C funding round. Bringing the total amount raised by the Irish firm to $43 million, the round was supposedly led by Northpond Ventures, with other participants being Borealis Ventures, Bill Maris’ Section 32 venture fund, Sands Capital Ventures and Founders Fund.
For the uninitiated, Teckro was founded in 2015 by brokers Nigel and Gary Hughes along with Jacek Skrzypiec. The company’s technology has been developed to improve the conduct of clinical trials, for instance using machine learning to enhance the accuracy and speed of the trials. The company also looks to increase the transparency of clinical trials across stakeholders as well as those who conduct the trials, such as research nurses, doctors and patients.
Co-founder and CEO Gary Hughes said that the industry is relying heavily on paper, on working using retrospective information, along with an over-reliance on sending CRAs to busy research sites. The disorganized experience and complexity of patients and research sites is only escalated by this approach, further increased by the plethora of point solutions that get bolted on, he mentioned.
Hughes stated that Teckro’s broader vision involves being at the center of all patient and site interactions in a clinical trial. The company is developing a new digital infrastructure as well as toolset for clinical research for making the conduct of trials more inclusive, more transparent and simpler. Hughes explained that the aim behind this is to make sure that effective drugs are being moved from lab to the patient efficiently, helping to save more lives.
Reportedly, Teckro has users in over 80 countries, which is significantly more that the 30 countries in August 2017 when it had closed the Series B funding round. The company has more than 100 employees throughout its global headquarters in Limerick, Ireland, its engineering hub in Dublin, Ireland and a base in Nashville, Tennessee in the U.S.