January 28, 2021 - Elucidata, a biomedical molecular data company, announced today a $5 million pre-Series A funding round led by IvyCap Ventures. The financing round also saw participation from Hyperplane Venture Capital and several angel investors. 

The funding will enable Elucidata to capitalize on its position as a leading provider of structured biomedical molecular data to the life sciences industry. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate product development, expand US operations, bolster marketing efforts, and continue hiring world-class talent in India.

Elucidata was founded in 2015 by University of Chicago and MIT graduate Abhishek Jha,  IIT Delhi graduate Swetabh Pathak, and Dr. Richard Kibbey (MD PhD) at Yale School of Medicine. The Delhi- and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company is focused on developing Polly, a data platform for drug discovery.

The company said that its proprietary cloud platform Polly is the largest repository of biomedical data for scientists trying to discover drugs. Elucidata launched Polly in April 2019 and now has over 30 partners in industry and academia as its customers. With Polly, scientists can get access to curated and analysis-ready data from over 100,000 biomedical datasets, a number that is doubling each quarter, accelerating data-driven discovery efforts. 

Commenting on the fundraise Vikram Gupta, Founder & Managing Partner, IvyCap Ventures, said, “In the pharma industry, biomedical data of drug discovery is increasing in diversity and volume at a rapid rate. In this scenario, it gives us immense pleasure to collaborate with a team which is driven by a vision of drug discovery and pharma R&D. Their platform, Polly, helps in making a large range of biological big data accessible and available to the scientists for machine learning.” 

"Polly's SaaS offering is well-timed with the rapidly increasing demand for solutions that extend the reach of publicly available and proprietary biomedical data for the age of data science in drug discovery," said Abhishek Jha, Co-founder and CEO, Elucidata. "As an industry, we're just scratching the surface of how powerful molecular data can be when made FAIR. The strong backing from IvyCap Ventures and Hyperplane would amplify our ability to help our partners improve in their data-driven drug discovery." 

Elucidata launched Polly in April 2019 and now has over 30 partners in industry and academia as its customers.