Revolutionizing Pharma Sales Enablement with AI: Our Investment in Odaia.
In 2021, the top seven pharmaceutical companies spent a staggering $103B on sales and marketing, 37% more than they did on R&D for new drugs. However, despite this large sales and marketing budget, the industry has been stuck in analog, relying primarily on face-to-face meetings, conferences, and fancy dinners to drive healthcare practitioner (HCP) engagement.
Now, as the pharmaceutical industry navigates the post-pandemic era, the need to transition to advanced sales tools has become more crucial than ever. COVID-19 made face-to-face HCP meetings more rare, and rising drug prices have forced pharma companies to streamline sales teams and adopt more cost-effective, digitally forward sales approaches. To remain competitive, pharma companies are redesigning their commercial models by investing in advanced sales tools that can deliver actionable insights and help sales teams optimize their outreach by targeting the right customers with the right message at the right time.
This is where Odaia comes in. The company has built an AI-powered sales enablement platform that provides pharma customers with predictive insights on customer acquisition, channel effectiveness, and sales performance. Today, we are thrilled to announce our investment in Odaia’s $25 Million Series B financing round, led by Threshold Ventures and Monograph Capital.
Real-Time Predictive Analytics for Pharma
Odaia’s flagship offering, Maputal, provides accurate and highly personalized insights on HCPs in a matter of hours versus the multiple weeks taken by competitors. How is that possible? Odaia combines multimodal data, including claims, prescription transactions, and lab results, with cutting-edge data science to unlock customer behaviours in near real-time. By leveraging AI to optimize sales and marketing strategies, Odaia helps pharmaceutical companies bring new treatments to patients more efficiently and cost-effectively. As the pharma industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace, Odaia’s dynamic solution is well-positioned to help its customers stay ahead of the competition.
The key to Odaia’s success lies not only in its groundbreaking technology but also in the talented team behind it. The company is a spin-out from the University of Toronto and University of Lausanne, and is built by impressive operators, led by Philip Poulidis, who have extensive experience in scaling enterprise software and applied data science and artificial intelligence.
Pharma is Calling, and Odaia’s Picking Up
In under two years of operation, Odaia’s technology is already in high demand. Last year the company grew revenue exponentially and garnered traction with several of the top 20 global pharma companies. The company has a commercial headstart in the $2.6B US pharma sales enablement market and the capacity to easily scale into new geographies. As more of pharma starts to transition from analog to digital sales motions, we believe Odaia will be well-positioned to capture market share and continue to innovate.
Congratulations to Philip and the Odaia team — WV is excited to be part of the Company’s journey!
