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Orchard Therapeutics Announces $150 Million Series C Financing to Advance Gene Therapy Pipeline

BOSTON and LONDON — Orchard Therapeutics, a leading commercial-stage company dedicated to transforming the lives of patients with rare diseases through innovative gene therapies, today announced the completion of an oversubscribed $150 million Series C financing.

Deerfield Management led the financing with significant new investments from RA Capital Management, Venrock, Foresite Capital, Perceptive Advisors, Cormorant Asset Management LP, ArrowMark Partners, Sphera Global Healthcare, Medison Ventures, Driehaus Capital Management and Ghost Tree Capital Group, LP, as well as additional U.S. based healthcare focused funds. Existing investors also participated including Temasek, Baillie Gifford, RTW Investments, LP, Cowen Healthcare Investments and Agent Capital.

Proceeds from the Series C financing will be used to progress Orchard’s three most advanced clinical programs: OTL-101 for adenosine deaminase severe combined immunodeficiency (ADA-SCID), OTL-200 for metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) and OTL-103 for Wiskott–Aldrich syndrome (WAS) towards registration and commercialization. The funding will also support the clinical and preclinical development of the company’s rare disease gene therapy pipeline.

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Buoy Health Partners With Boston Children’s Hospital To Improve The Way Parents Currently Assess Their Children’s Symptoms Online

BOSTON — Buoy Health (www.buoyhealth.com), a health technology company that develops digital tools to help people from the moment they get sick start their care on the right foot, today announced that it has named Boston Children’s Hospital, the leading children’s hospital in the United States, its first innovation partner. As part of the multi-pronged strategic partnership, Boston Children’s hospital will integrate Buoy’s advanced AI into its website and will work side-by-side with the health-tech startup to provide input on the product’s future enhancements and developments.

“Every day, we see thousands of parents come to Buoy who are unsure of where to go or what to do next when their kids are sick,” said Dr. Andrew Le, CEO of Buoy Health. “By combining our AI technology with the cutting edge pediatric knowledge of Boston Children’s hospital, we will improve our ability to deliver the best possible healthcare advice to parents and get their kids to the right care at the right time. We are proud to be working with this world-class institution to further our mission of building technology with heart for the health of every person.”

As Buoy’s first innovation partner, Boston Children’s hospital will aid Buoy in improving its pediatric capabilities. Currently, parents concerned about their children’s symptoms gain advice from Buoy by visiting its home page, www.buoyhealth.com. Yet, now, by being placed on the Boston Children hospital’s website, Buoy will now be able to naturally train its advanced machine learning on a more diverse set of parents.

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Even Financial Secures $25 Million in Capital Raise

New York, NY — August 7, 2018 — Even Financial (“Even”), a fintech company that is evolving the consumer financial services ecosystem with its leading recommendation engine and acquisition platform, announced today that it has raised $18.8 million in Series A funding led by GreatPoint Ventures. The round includes participation from Goldman Sachs, Canaan Partners, F-Prime Capital, Lerer Hippeau and notable investors, including NerdWallet co-founder Jacob Gibson and Jason Owen, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Credit.com. The Series A financing includes a previously announced investment of $3.3 million secured in January from American Express Ventures, Arab Angels, Plug and Play Ventures and Valuestream Ventures. The Series A comes after Even’s $6.2 million seed round, totaling $25 million in funding for the company to date. The new funds will be used to continue to accelerate growth and tackle new product verticals, including deposits, credit cards and mortgages.

Even’s recommendation API acts as a trusted intermediary between banks and third parties – such as personal finance websites, apps and points of sale – to offer optimal financial product recommendations, and has been growing rapidly over the last year. Each month, over three million consumers transact across the Even network to be matched with the right financial products.

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RiskRecon, Third-Party Cyber Risk Management Provider, Secures $25 Million in Series B Funding, Led by Accel

Investment will accelerate adoption of RiskRecon’s industry-leading SaaS platform that dramatically improves the third-party cyber risk process

RiskRecon, the fastest-growing company transforming management of third-party cyber risk, today announced it has raised $25 million in Series B financing. Led by Accel and joined by existing investors Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and F-Prime Capital, the global venture capital firm affiliated with Fidelity Investments, the round brings RiskRecon’s total funding to more than $40 million. Existing individual investors Mickey Boodaei, Rakesh Loonkar, and Paul Sagan also participated in the round. In conjunction with the investment, Accel partner Nate Niparko will join the company’s Board of Directors. RiskRecon will use the capital to meet increasing global market demand for third-party cyber risk management solutions.

“Third-party cyber risk is the single largest unchecked attack vector that sophisticated attackers are exploiting in some of the most damaging cyberattacks in recent years,” said Kelly White, RiskRecon’s CEO and Co-founder. “Current approaches to managing third-party cyber risk with annual questionnaires and intermittent, manual processes fall short because they cannot scale as organizations outsource more and more work to third parties as the result of trends such as globalization and cloud adoption. RiskRecon’s proven, automated approach to identifying, understanding, and acting on third-party cyber risk delivers tangible value for all key stakeholders demanding closer oversight of risk within their organizations.”

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Protenus President to Discuss How Analytics Align Privacy and Security Vision to Reality

BOSTON — As the healthcare industry continues to suffer more data breaches than any other industry, privacy and security teams are tasked with managing an ever-increasing number of threats to patient data, often with limited resources and mixed institutional support, according to Robert Lord, president and co-founder of Protenus, a healthcare compliance analytics platform that protects patient privacy at our nation’s leading health systems. Lord, who is a featured speaker at the Healthcare Informatics Health IT Summit in Boston, will be speaking on the topic, as well as on strategies healthcare organizations can use to build trust with the patients they serve by better-protecting health data.

Lord’s presentation on “How Analytics are Aligning Privacy and Security Vision and Reality” will discuss emerging technologies that replace reactive, manual processes and give privacy and security teams the ability to audit every access to health data.

Lord’s presentation on “How Analytics are Aligning Privacy and Security Vision and Reality” will discuss emerging technologies that replace reactive, manual processes and give privacy and security teams the ability to audit every access to health data.

The ineffectiveness of traditional compliance tools, coupled with the limited time and resources available to privacy and security teams, leads to a limited ability to proactively discover inappropriate access to patient data. Often times, this unfortunate reality results in dealing with the aftermath of compliance and HIPAA violations, instead of proactively identifying, mitigating and preventing these incidents.

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Denali Therapeutics Announces Positive Clinical Results From LRRK2 Inhibitor Program for Parkinson’s Disease

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Denali Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: DNLI), a biopharmaceutical company developing a broad portfolio of product candidates for neurodegenerative diseases, today announced positive results from its Phase 1 clinical study with DNL201, a small molecule inhibitor of leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2).

In a randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled, oral dose study in healthy subjects, DNL201 achieved its safety, pharmacokinetic, and pharmacodynamic objectives. DNL201 was generally well tolerated with no serious adverse events at doses that achieved high levels of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) exposure, robust target engagement as measured by two blood-based biomarkers of LRRK2 activity, and effects on biomarkers of lysosomal function.

Mutations in the LRRK2 gene are the most frequent genetic cause of Parkinson’s disease and a major driver of lysosomal dysfunction, which contribute to the formation of Lewy body protein aggregates and neurodegeneration. LRRK2 regulates lysosomal genesis and function, which is impaired in Parkinson’s disease and may be restored by LRRK2 inhibition, thereby potentially positively modifying disease progression in patients with a genetic LRRK2 mutation as well as in patients with sporadic Parkinson’s disease.

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Simon Data Raises $20 Million to Take Big Data End-to-End for Marketers

NEW YORK — Simon Data, the first and only enterprise Customer Data Platform with a fully-integrated marketing cloud, today announced the close of a $20 million Series B funding round to further develop its arsenal of solutions for marketers.

The financing was led by Polaris Partners, and follows a Series A funding round in 2015. The company was founded by Jason Davis, Josh Neckes, and Matt Walker, and has raised a total of $32 million to date.

“The current crop of enterprise CDPs are falling short of their promise to deliver on personalization,” said Josh Neckes, Co-Founder & President of Simon Data. “Like us, they have the capacity to join data from disparate sources to build a rich, unified view of the customer. Unlike us, they’re completely incapable of complex campaign orchestration. With more ways to engage customers than ever, marketers are demanding complex cross-channel workflows, deep insights and journey management. That’s where the value is and where we come in.”

Simon’s disruptive platform vision of blending the messaging and orchestration capabilities of a marketing cloud with the critical infrastructure offered by an enterprise-scale CDP quickly attracted major customers such as Airbnb, OpenTable, Blue Apron, TrueCar, and Rover. Simon enables these and other major brands to leverage all of their customer data to drive personalized, optimized communication in any end-channel.

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S&P Global and Kensho Technologies Launch Kensho Labs; Fast-Tracking Innovation and New Product Development

NEW YORK — S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI) announced today that the Company has unveiled a new innovation space on the S&P Global Platform called Kensho Labs. In collaboration with Kensho Technologies LLC (“Kensho”), acquired by SPGI in April, select internal users and S&P Global Market Intelligence clients can now access a digital innovation lab for prototyping new product solutions.

Several initial offerings from Kensho Labs leverage S&P Global’s data combined with Kensho’s cutting-edge machine learning capabilities to create new insights for financial decision makers:

Credit Loss Model for Banks: The S&P Global Market Intelligence Risk Services team partnered with Kensho Labs to model credit risk-related scenarios using alternative data culled from internet search results. This model provides users with forward looking risk measures of credit losses at both the entity and the macro-level.
Commercial Real Estate Model: The S&P Global Market Intelligence Real Estate team partnered with Kensho Labs to model the risk exposure of real estate companies, both at the macro level and the individual property level. The model leverages data from Market Intelligence as well as a variety of alternative data to enable users to better understand the risk exposure of real estate companies.

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Flywire, Startup Raises $100 Million To Allow College, Hospital And Business Bills To Be Paid In Foreign Currency

Flywire, a Boston-based fintech company that helps universities, hospitals and businesses accept foreign-currency payments, has raised $100 million in new funding. Temasek, a Singapore investment company with a $235 billion portfolio, led the Series D round. Bain Capital Ventures and Fidelity’s F-Prime Capital also contributed.

The 300-person company expects to reach annualized revenue of $100 million later this year, and it closed the new investment round at a significantly higher valuation than its 2015 level of about $100 million. The new valuation falls short of $1 billion, but Flywire declined to disclose further details.

Founded in 2009 by Spanish entrepreneur Iker Marcaide, Flywire (formerly called peerTransfer) started by solving a problem that international college students often faced. Let’s say a Chinese student attending Boston University needed to pay her $50,000 annual tuition. She’d have to pay in dollars and likely use a bank transfer wire, incurring exorbitant foreign-exchange-rate fees of 3% to 5%. And the transaction might not settle for up to 10 days.

Flywire built software that connects banks to universities. Now the Chinese student can pay her tuition in yuan and can use payment methods she’s familiar with, like Alipay or WeChat. Likewise, a U.S. student at a foreign school can use a Visa card or PayPal to pay tuition in dollars. “Flywire becomes the pay button,” CEO Mike Massaro says.

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Innovent Receives IND Approval to Initiate Clinical Trials in China with its anti-OX40 Agonistic Antibody IBI101 and its anti-RANKL Antibody IBI307

SUZHOU, China — Innovent Biologics, a world-class China-based biopharmaceutical company that develops and intends to commercialize high quality innovative antibody-based therapeutics, today announced that it has received Investigational New Drug (IND) approval from the China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) to initiate clinical trials in China with IBI101, an anti-OX40 agonistic antibody, and with IBI307, an anti-RANKL antibody.

Innovent’s IBI101, is the first OX40-targeted molecule to receive IND approval in China. OX40 is one of the most important targets in the field of immune-oncology. Innovent will be among one of a few companies pursuing the development of OX40 agonists in early stage clinical trials globally. IBI307 is an anti-RANKL antibody under development for the treatment of osteoporosis and lytic bone lesions associated with cancer metastasis. Currently there is no anti-RANKL inhibitors approved for marketing in China.

“The IND approvals for IBI101 and IBI307 by CFDA once again demonstrate Innovent’s capability and commitment to lead the rapid development of China’s biopharmaceutical market. As part of our 17 drug candidates under development, we will prepare to bring these two targeted therapeutic agents into clinical trials quickly,” said Michael Yu, Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman. “Innovent will continue to discover and develop new biopharmaceutical drugs to expand our portfolio of products to treat patients. With today’s rapid improvements in cancer treatment modalities, we will utilize our well-established platform to discover, develop, manufacture and commercialize innovative high-quality biopharmaceutical drugs.”

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