Clinical trial workflow platform Florence Healthcare raises $27M

The company now helps more than 10,000 research sites in 45 countries

The pharma industry spends $120 billion every year on running clinical drug trials, which includes hiring people to go out and meet with doctors and set up trials. They also pay that doctor to staff up the site with nurses and other doctors and they enroll patients to prove if that drug is safe and effective so it can be approved by the FDA.

There's a lot of waste in that process: about $20 billion is spent finding the trial sites , setting them up, auditing them, and then collecting the data, before tearing it all down to do it all over again.

Florence Healthcare helps eliminate some of that waste by automating the clinical trial process. On Wednesday, the company announced a $27 million Series C-1 funding round led by Insight Partners, which led the Series C, bring its total funding to $114.1 million.

Founded in 2014, Florence's products include electronic binder workflows for sites, electronic consent workflows, and electronic trial master file workflows. It also provides access to an activate remote site start-up, monitoring, and source data review/verification on SiteLink.

Through its platform, pharma companies can get information on what sites have what patients or what capabilities. Because sites have chosen Florence as their solution to help them conduct their trials, the company has the data about what sites are more effective for what studies, which saves the pharma companies time and money getting that information themselves. 

Florence also automates the paperwork that goes into the rules and procedures from the FDA about who's allowed to do things, and what they're allowed to do, when treating a patient with an experimental therapy. And then, finally, it provides connectivity, so that  it not only helps track the patients, but also helps the pharma companies track the doctors for future trials.

The company currently helps more than 10,000 research sites in 45 countries manage their documents, data and workflows, and its users now perform 4 million remote monitoring activities each month. During the pandemic, it was the system of record for both the Pfizer and J&J vaccine studies.

Florence says it will use the funding to expand its team, enhance its product offerings, and accelerate the connectivity across its network of over 10,000 clinical trial sites and sponsors.

"With this funding, we're strengthening our position as the research platform for the remote-work era,” Ryan Jones, CEO of Florence Healthcare, said in a statement.

"We're celebrating two major milestones with this funding: 100 million research documents hosted on our platform and 100 million remote research activities conducted in our ecosystem.”

(Image source: florencehc.com)