Savana is set for international expansion, redefining medicine development and exploitation of patient data by hospitals
Madrid, 3 August, 2018. Savana, an innovative Big Data and AI healthcare company, has successfully closed a €3.8M funding round. The round was led by Seaya Ventures with participation from existing angel investors.
The company was launched in 2014 and just four years later its client base included 9 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in the world and more than 43 private and public hospitals in Spain. The company is currently localising its platform for other European markets in response to client demand for international projects. The team consists of medical practitioners, computer engineers, computational linguists and mathematicians.
R&D expenditure in the pharmaceutical industry is now more than $170Bn globally. In the last twenty years, the average return on this R&D expenditure has declined from around 18% to about 4%, while annual funding for research has more than doubled and drug approvals have declined by a third. The main reason for this is the exhaustion of a model based on broad indications, while the unstructured free-text content of electronic health records has remained untapped. Savana has identified this huge opportunity and developed a proprietary technology platform that can understand and extract insights from doctor’s notes in free text. This platform has analysed more than 172 million real-life health records to date.
The company’s products have enabled hospitals to extract insights from doctor’s notes for the first time to optimise their operations and boost research and innovation in clinical practice. Pharmaceutical companies use Savana’s technology solution to make clinical research faster and more accurate. Savana is also currently developing Savana Predict, an analytics tool for hospitals that enables predictive medicine.
Jorge Tello Guijarro, Savana’s CEO and one of its co-founders, commented: “This new investment will help us achieve our mission to revolutionise how the unstructured free-text content of health records is used in clinical research, improving healthcare systems and fostering personalised medicine. This funding will help us expand internationally and continue to develop our product offering.
We have chosen Seaya Ventures as our core investor due to its founder-focused approach, expertise in providing active support to technology companies during upscaling and internationalisation, and its ability to support our funding needs throughout our growth in the coming years.”
Antonio Gimenez de Cordoba, Partner at Seaya Ventures,said: “We are impressed with the team’s achievements to date. Thanks to its unique platform leveraging Big Data and AI technologies, Savana has fantastic potential to become the leading clinical data analytics solution worldwide. We are delighted to be partnering them in the next phase of their growth.”
About Savana
SAVANA is a private company that uses artificial intelligence and Big Data technologies to transform the data in medical records into reusable information. Savana uses EHRead, a medical language engine developed in-house for reusing the unstructured free text in digital medical records. On top of this proprietary technology, it develops final products that are designed by and for clinicians to solve specific clinical problems. Savana Manager, Savana Research and Savana Consulta have already demonstrated market interest and acceptance. The next product in the pipeline is Savana Predict, which is also based on proprietary technology (‘Entropia’), which will advance disease diagnosis for each patient, revolutionising medical practice worldwide.
About Seaya Ventures
Seaya Ventures is a venture capital fund founded in 2013 with €160M of assets under management. Seaya invests in early and growth stage internet and technology-enabled businesses in Spain and Latin America, supporting them in their expansion and growth to become regional and global leaders. Through its Seaya I and Seaya II funds, Seaya has invested in 18 companies, including Cabify, Glovo and Spotahome.
