Clinical trial data platform Lokavant raises $21M

The company provides a data analytics platform for clinical trials

Not only have the number of clinical trials nearly quadrupled since 2010, going from under 100,000 to over 350,000, but they are also becoming more complex, requiring major protocol rewrites, with far more data being generated, from 1.2 million datapoints in 2010 to 3.6 million in 2020. All of this is causing trials to be more fragmented. 

Lokavant is looking to fix that problem by aggregating and integrating real-time data from disparate trial data sources and using it to provide advanced analytics, thereby allowing study teams to plan and manage their studies and surface insights.

On Wednesday, the company announced that it raised a $21 million investment round from growth equity investment firm Edison Partners. Lokavant was incubated by Roivant Health and piloted with numerous Roivant biotech "Vants" as customers, who also participated in the investment round.

Along with the funding, it was also revealed that Gregg Michaelson, General Partner at Edison, will join Lokavant's board of directors.

"Through his prior experience as a CEO, Gregg knows what it means to successfully operate a business. He has deep domain knowledge in healthcare, pharma-tech data analytics companies, and a proven history accelerating growth companies with significant and consistent market success," Rohit Nambisan, Lokavant's CEO and co-founder, told VatorNews.  

The New York City-based Lokavant works with pharma R&D sponsors and CROs running late phase global clinical trials, providing them with flexible data unification, so they can ingest, standardize, and aggregate data wherever it sits in real time. The company also provides deep data analytics using active and historic trial data, including site data and investigator data. 

Applications for Lokavant include milestone tracking, risk detection, study planning, enrollment forecasting, and medical monitoring. 

For its customers, the platform has been able to demonstrate the ability to identify critical issues eight months earlier, was able to harmonize over 300 systems 12x faster, show a 15% reduction in effort by eliminating reconciliation, and show a 70x improvement in enrollment forecast. 

The company saw triple-digit growth in 2022, as pharmaceutical companies and their contract research organization partners seek new ways of expediting novel therapeutics development.

Lokavant says it will use the funds to scale its commercial teams; it currently has 37 full time employees, and will be at over 60 by the end of the year. It will deploy the money to accelerate feature development for its platform.

"With this funding, we plan to extend our platform upstream with applications such as data-driven patient finding, site and investigator selection, study planning scenario analyses, and automated machine-driven enrollment forecasting," said Nambisan.

"Our ultimate goal is to be the leading platform that empowers clinical researchers with critical data for smarter and faster trials."