Why we invested in NyquistData: The Bloomberg for Life Sciences
Peterson Ventures Led NyquistData's $6m Seed Round
At Peterson Ventures, our investment decisions are rooted in our relationships with founders. We are especially compelled to invest when we meet a CEO with a unique set of strengths and industry experiences, one with the foresight to reimagine large markets and the capability to commit to the real work of leading that transformation.
We also look for early signals of product-market fit. These signals often take the form of feedback from delighted early customers who can’t imagine returning to a pre-product existence. With minds prepared to help navigate a set of sector-specific conditions for achieving growth, we are encouraged by these early indications of customer delight, most often the product of a founder’s proven ability to anticipate buyer behavior based on deep customer development work.
Over the course of getting to know Michelle Wu, co-founder and CEO of NyquistData, and her Tech co-founder Qiang Kou (K.K), we found that NyquistData checked all of these boxes. We are delighted to announce that we led their $6m Series Seed to build what Michelle calls “the Bloomberg for life science data.”
I met Michelle Wu in 2021 and was immediately struck by the resolute way she has leveraged her expertise. From offices in Shanghai, Tokyo, London, and Basel, Michelle developed and refined her command working for Novartis and Boston Consulting Group in a career dedicated to understanding global healthcare and addressing the complexities that cause costly delays in research and development.
As an operator, her work encompassed every primary life science sector, including pharmaceuticals (Rx and OTC), diagnostics, and medical devices. Professionals like Michelle, tasked with producing cost-effective go-to-market strategies, depend almost solely on evidence. That evidence resides in critical data from decades of clinical trials, competitive benchmarking, etc. But, it is scattered and siloed, often stored in unwieldy government repositories, documented in numerous languages. Making sense of the information required a massive amount of time and manual effort to locate, extract, collate, analyze and make it usable.
In this daily disarray, Michelle saw only the opportunity. Made possible by advances in artificial intelligence, Michelle and K.K. created a platform that turns decades of unstructured data from the FDAs around the world to help medical device and pharmaceutical companies make better decisions on clinical trial design, global market strategy and FastTrack FDA approvals. Their solution would serve an immense market – worldwide; annual spending on data insights for research and development in medtech alone is poised to surpass $36B annually, while pharmaceutical companies deploy $202B annually.
Founded in 2020, NyquistData, aggregates and analyzes unstructured data from life science research stored in siloed government databases in the US, Europe, China, and Japan. Nyquist augments this information with real-world data and AI-driven insights from across the supply chain to offer customers unprecedented access to decades of research, clinical trials, and approvals. With over 402,000 clinical trial reports and 760,000 global devices covered in their database, Nyquist Data eliminates wasted time searching for data and accelerates approval time by over 50%.
The speed with which NyquistData delivers go-to-market will fundamentally change the life science industry. Over the last decade, Peterson Ventures invested extensively in health tech including companies like Eargo (NASDAQ: EAR), Nomi Health, Artemis Health, and Tava Health, to name a few. While healthcare SaaS is an active investment area for us, we had not yet invested in a SaaS company with Life Sciences customers until NyquistData.
We have looked at many deals in or around the clinical trials space. It became clear that companies that improve the speed or likelihood of success for clinical trials can generate lasting good in the world and enormous value for life science companies (a delayed clinical trial can cost as much as a staggering $8,000,000 per day in lost revenue). When I consider the enormity of the task for Nyquist to continue to discover, aggregate and analyze life science data from trusted resources globally, it’s easier to imagine why the team remains undaunted. They have every opportunity to measurably reduce suffering and increase both quality and years of life for patients.
Michelle Wu is a force of nature, and NyquistData exists to advance the use of data to unlock new insights, improve clinical outcomes, transform an industry, and save lives. Dozens of enterprise life science corporations, including Medtronic, Becton Dickinson, and Hoya Vision, across seven countries are loyal clients, and in the six weeks leading to our investment, Nyquist closed multiple new contracts and nearly doubled ARR.
We are delighted to announce that NyquistData came out of stealth today, announcing a $6m Seed round led by Peterson Ventures - check out Geri Stengel’s interview of CEO Michelle Wu on Forbes for the story. With participation from GSR Ventures and Village Global, NyquistData is supported by an incredible syndicate. We couldn’t be more excited to work with Michelle and the NyquistData team. If you want to be part of empowering life science companies to bring innovation to market faster (and saving lives), we’re hiring.
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