Highlights:

  • The second round of funding chipped in USD 45 million while the first funding raised USD 10 million.
  • This round was led by a new investor, Ellerston JAADE. Existing shareholders – Main Sequence and Horizons Ventures – too contributed.
  • Through its platform, Prospection enables healthcare organizations to collect and analyze massive amounts of data to improve patient care.

Sydney-based health analytics start-up, Prospection, raised USD 45 million in its second external funding round. The funding was led by Ellerston Capital’s JAADE fund, which chipped in USD 30 million. The remaining funds came in from existing investors, Main Sequence Ventures’ (MSV) CSIRO Innovation Fund and Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures.   With this, the healthcare company aims to capitalize on the growing trend of personalized medicine.

Prospection is a health analytics startup that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to identify patients with life-threatening diseases and tracks treatment patterns. With the use of AI and ML, the firm gets multiple patient and commercial data sets. In collaboration, algorithms ingest multiple longitudinal patient and commercial datasets globally from sources such as Governments, insurers and health records and this helps produce accurate insights at high speed. The datasets help them decide on the best treatment plan for a patient. It also helps them locate patients who would benefit from improved therapeutic decisions.

The first round of funding was done in 2019; together, MSV and Horizon Ventures raised USD 10 million. The healthcare data analytics company was founded in 2012 by current CEO Eric Chung, CTO Ricky Chen, and head of data and partnerships, DR Peter Cronin. Following the successful 2019 raise, the company expanded its operations globally. It now has offices in Japan and South Korea, too.

Prospection is a platform that enables healthcare organizations to collect and analyze massive amounts of data to improve patient care. It works with Governments and pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs and improve the existing ones. AI-based solutions help gather critical insights from clinical trials, which often involve large numbers of patients.

For instance, PharmMap, a software platform, uses geospatial mapping technology to identify and navigate various health trends and locations.

Prospection’s platform, PharmDash, uses longitudinal data to provide various analytical tools to analyze patient data. It does so by taking advantage of de-identified patient data to restore privacy. Bill Bartee from Main Sequence Ventures and Chris Liu of Horizons Ventures are part of the company’s board.

Expert’s view:

While speaking to The Australian Financial Review, Co-Founder and CEO at Prospection, Eric Chung said that clients were the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, but Prospection was working towards providing services to the Government, then doctors and patients.

“Everything is de-identified before it gets to us, so we can follow a patient through time, but we don’t know who the patient is or the doctor,” he said.

“Our algorithm follows people over time and actually looks at how something you did in the past could impact what the outcome may be in future.”

Chung further added that it was important to get information in doctors’ hands because, according to their data, only 60 per cent of the patients were treated in an ideal way.