CAMPBELL — Saama Technologies, Inc. announced funds led by global investment firm Carlyle have made a strategic growth investment and will acquire a majority stake in the Company. A broad co-investor group with several healthcare-focused venture funds, including Amgen Ventures, Intermountain Ventures, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (“Merck GHI”), McKesson Ventures, Northpond Ventures, Pfizer Ventures, and Population Health Partners, will be investing alongside Carlyle. The total investment could be up to $430 million.
The partnership will allow Saama to accelerate its strategic initiatives, including expanding its go-to-market capabilities and further investing in AI research and development.
Saama’s intelligent Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC) is used by over 50 pharma and biotech companies on more than 1,500 studies. As an end-to-end platform, LSAC provides a unified approach to clinical trial data management and analytics. LSAC’s pre-trained AI embedded smart applications have the ability to learn the complex patterns among clinical data and provide predictive insights to accelerate the clinical research process across a variety of domains and therapeutic areas.
“The life sciences industry is experiencing a massive shift in strategic approaches to accelerating drug development as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and AI-driven analytics solutions like Saama’s LSAC are at the forefront. These solutions’ role in successfully enabling the delivery of COVID-19 vaccines and therapies to patients in mere months was the litmus test for the future of drug development,” said Suresh Katta, Founder and CEO, Saama Technologies. “This investment by Carlyle and leading healthcare-focused venture funds reflects the value they see in Saama’s leadership of this new era and the promise offered by our state-of-the-art solutions.”
“The life sciences industry is at an exciting crossroads, poised to adopt and integrate sophisticated data management and analytics solutions that we believe will accelerate clinical timelines in previously unimaginable ways,” said Joe Bress, a Managing Director specializing in Healthcare at Carlyle. “We’re excited to partner with Saama as they work to redefine the drug development paradigm.”
“AI-driven analytics solutions are transforming the way that data is managed and therefore the way that work is done. We believe Saama can play a key role in that transformation for the life sciences industry,” said Ashley Evans, a Managing Director specializing in Technology at Carlyle. “As the convergence of healthcare and technology reaches an inflection point, we are excited to help Saama capture the compelling market opportunity ahead.”
“Merck GHI sees tremendous opportunity in Saama’s mission of accelerating clinical trials,” said David M. Rubin, Ph.D., Managing Director at Merck GHI. “It is very exciting to be part of a world-class investment syndicate with such deep healthcare domain expertise and interest in supporting the build of scaled resources that have the potential to change the way clinical research and development is conducted.”
The investment in Saama is a continuation of Carlyle’s long-term global commitment to both healthcare and technology, in which it has invested $17 billion and $25 billion of equity since inception, respectively – including $2 billion in healthcare technology and tech-enabled growth companies.
