ODAIA is a leading provider of automated commercial predictive insights trusted by global life sciences organizations that utilizes proprietary data-driven and AI-powered methods to identify distinct population subsets and their healthcare providers in the most efficient way possible. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed ODAIA CEO and co-founder Philip Poulidis.
Philip Poulidis’ Background
Poulidis is a career entrepreneur with multiple exits, as well as an executive with experience at both high growth startups like ODAIA as well as large-scale technology companies like Marvell Semiconductor and BlackBerry.
Formation Of ODAIA
How did the idea for ODAIA come together? “ODAIA was founded out of the University of Toronto, leveraging years of work in process mining and AI. Our focus has always been and will continue to be the engineering, development and application of technically complex solutions (including the use of AI, machine learning, or generative AI and large language models) to help deliver value in the life sciences sector.”
Favorite Memory At ODAIA
What has been Poulidis’ favorite memory working for ODAIA so far? “My favorite memory is probably also the funniest memory, which is a song that one of our customers’ employees created, using ChatGPT, to capture the essence of their experience in working with ODAIA and the positive impact that our platform can have on their business,” Poulidis shared.
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges Poulidis’ faced building the company and has the current macroeconomic climate had any effect on the company? “Fundraising in this current environment was a bit more difficult and circumstances were a lot different from when we raised our Series A. A lot more diligence is being done by investors and they are a lot more prepared than prior years, which is encouraging. In the past, with a few metrics, you would be able to get to a term sheet pretty quickly, but it took longer in this environment. It proved to be a bit more challenging but we ran a tight process and were well prepared,” Poulidis acknowledged.
Core Products
What are ODAIA’s core products and features? Poulidis told me that ODAIA are the developers of MAPTUAL, an AI-powered commercial insights SaaS platform for pharmaceutical companies. MAPTUAL is engineered to take the guess-work out of Pharma’s current workflow by unifying commercial teams through digestible and actionable predictive insights. The company’s two products MAPTUAL Field and MAPTUAL Sphere are built on an easy to navigate platform that provides a near-real-time and predictive perspective on a brand and its market.
— MAPTUAL Field provides sales reps with a granular view of health care providers, enabling pharma sales reps to use robust segments, prescription data – both historical and predicted – to improve their pre-call planning and spend more time seeing customers rather than analyzing data.
— MAPTUAL Sphere enables sales managers to effectively coach their team by discussing territory brand and market dynamics and HCP channel preferences. And marketers are also able to understand the contribution of different channels, by HCP segment, on prescription trends to make better marketing strategy and execution decisions.
Using MAPTUAL Field and MAPTUAL Sphere together enables tailored insights to be delivered to the right teams, while ensuring consistency in analytics and data sources, and ultimately leading to better and timely patient care.
Evolution Of ODAIA’s Technology
How has ODAIA’s technology evolved since launching? “Some of the early research work was centered around analyzing patient journeys and using AI and Machine Learning to optimize those journeys,” Poulidis explained. “Over time, we evolved to include the analysis of many different, but related, data sources, including prescriber transactions, anonymized patient health claims data, population demographic and socioeconomic data, anonymized lab data, and more. We have also added integrations to other platforms used by life sciences companies, including Veeva and Salesforce. Our AI and ML algorithms have also improved over time as we added additional data sets and worked across multiple therapeutic areas and geographics.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of ODAIA’s most significant milestones? “Our most significant milestone to date has been our growth between 2021 and 2022, in both annual recurring revenue, as well as customer count, and therapeutic areas supported. In addition to our most recent $25 million (USD) Series B, other significant ODAIA milestones include our $13.8 million Series A fundraise, as well as the signing of multiple top 20 pharmaceutical companies as clients,” Poulidis noted.
Customer Success Stories
When I asked Poulidis about a company success storyies, he replied:
“Over a six-month period, ODAIA helped a Top-10 pharma company achieve their brand objectives through the implementation and widespread adoption of MAPTUAL Field. During that time, the company’s fieldforce successfully used MAPTUAL Field’s predictive insights to access more relevant Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) for that brand and specific indications. MAPTUAL Field users experienced an overall 6% lift in new patient starts and demonstrated a heightened ability to accurately anticipate HCP needs. MAPTUAL Field provided an overall 8x return on investment within those six months.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is ODAIA pursuing? “The commercial pharmaceutical analytics market is expected to reach over $57 billion by 2030. The US healthcare industry spends $30 billion per year on marketing with $20 billion of that directly focused on marketing to healthcare professionals. Not only are we excited about the existing market opportunity but also about how ODAIA’s technology can be leveraged to drive efficiency and insights across other areas of pharma,” Poulidis analyzed.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates ODAIA from its competition? “Our competitors are consulting firms that deliver historical insights based on manually analyzed data sets. Typically, it is a manual, labor intensive and time consuming process, but what separates ODAIA is that we can do in hours or days what consulting firms do over multiple months,” Poulidis answered. “With an urgent need to embrace new strategies in data, customer segmentation and brand experience, we’re providing near-real time insights that include a robust understanding of the relevant providers and the patients they are treating, brand and market forecasts, target curation and prioritization for call planning, and an understanding of the most effective channels to reach those targets.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of ODAIA’s future company goals? “We’ll use the latest investment to further advance our(AI)-powered product offerings, allowing the pharma companies to deliver various life changing therapies to the patients faster. We plan to further expand our presence in North America and beyond. Primarily, we’ll expand our Go-to-Market efforts, which will entail growing our sales and customer support teams. We’ll also put a portion of our Series B capital towards adding some additional technical talent and developing more features and integrations,” Poulidis concluded.
