With £1M funding, UK’s Talking Medicines wants to scaleup its AI Pharma tool

Synthetic Intelligence (AI) has change into an influential expertise which is redefining companies, offering personalisation to customers and automating so lots of their trade processes. On the similar time, AI-powered medical applied sciences are quickly evolving as nicely. 

Glasgow and London-based knowledge tech innovator startup — Talking Medicines — which makes use of superior AI to supply pharmaceutical firms with real-time knowledge intelligence claims to be the world’s first social intelligence firm for the pharmaceutical trade.

£1M deal for Speaking Medicines

Now the information is simply in that the corporate has acquired a major increase with a £1.1 million funding deal to scale up its AI-based knowledge expertise platform for measuring affected person sentiment. The funding was led by Tern Plc, an funding firm specialising within the Web of Issues (“IoT”). It’s the lead investor within the syndicated funding spherical of £1,100,000 alongside The Scottish Funding Financial institution, Scottish Enterprise’s funding arm.

Scale-up knowledge tech platform

Led by CEO Jo Halliday alongside co-founders Dr Elizabeth Fairley and Dr Scott Crae, Speaking Medicines will use the funds to assist the launch and roll-out of a brand new AI knowledge platform, which can translate what sufferers are saying into actionable pharma grade intelligence by offering a world affected person confidence rating by medication. As a part of these plans, the enterprise intends to right away recruit 9 new workers to the NLP knowledge tech crew.

Shaped in 2013 to create new methods of capturing the voice of the affected person, Speaking Medicines makes use of a mix of Synthetic Intelligence, Machine Studying and Pure Language Processing tech instruments to seize and analyse the conversations and behaviours of sufferers at house, with the intention of reworking large pharma’s understanding of affected person sentiment.

Via mapping the affected person voice from social media and linked gadgets to regulated medication info, Speaking Medicines is ready to construct knowledge factors to find out developments and patterns of affected person sentiment throughout medicines. This Intelligence allows pharmaceutical firms to make affected person centric advertising and marketing choices, driving more practical medicines and advertising and marketing spend.

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Actual-time, compliant Intelligence can substitute conventional focus teams, prescriber stories and scientific goal affected person profiles to inform pharmaceutical firms who’s utilizing their medicines, how, and what they actually consider their manufacturers.

Speaking Medicines has now raised £2.5 million up to now, together with three earlier seed funding rounds with earlier traders together with affect investor SIS Ventures and the Scottish Funding Financial institution.

Since launched 7 years in the past, the enterprise has scooped quite a lot of accolades for its progressive method together with successful Rising Stars 2.0, a contest to pick out the rising stars of UK tech. Most just lately, the enterprise was chosen to hitch Tech Nation’s Utilized AI 2.0 Development Programme, designed to champion and assist ‘the UK’s most distinctive deep tech scaleups’.

Speaking Medicines CEO, Jo Halliday, mentioned: “We’re delighted that Tern is becoming a member of our investor group, and Al Sisto shall be bringing his wealth of expertise to the Board. Now greater than ever we passionately consider that large pharma wants a scientific option to make knowledge pushed choices by way of accessing excessive grade social intelligence pushed from the affected person. This funding will scale our crew and the event of our AI, ML, NLP tech instruments to translate what sufferers are saying into actionable pharma grade intelligence by way of our world affected person confidence rating by medication.”

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Commenting on the funding, Tern CEO, Al Sisto, mentioned, “We’re actually excited so as to add Speaking Medicines to our portfolio. It’s a firm that brings experience in synthetic Intelligence and machine studying to our portfolio with its platform and is fixing a important downside for an trade that spends round US$30 billion on advertising and marketing yearly, while missing systematic knowledge instruments that may construction affected person sentiment from social channels. The Speaking Medicines platform, with its pure language processing and differentiated expertise gives pharma firms with the power to seek out significant and useful insights from the c.50% and rising proportion of the world’s inhabitants who’re energetic on social media. This provides Speaking Medicines’ shoppers the power to seize useful measurements and insights about their merchandise from the voice of their very own sufferers. 

“We sit up for working with the Speaking Medicines crew because the proceeds of our funding are used to scale the enterprise.”

UK-Authorities backed programme to scale up AI pharma instrument

Final month, Speaking Medicines additionally turned part of Tech Nation’s Utilized AI 2.0 Development Programme, introduced on October 14. 

Tech Nation is the expansion platform for tech firms and leaders which fuels the expansion of game-changing founders, leaders, and scaling firms to allow them to positively remodel societies and economies. They maintain years of expertise facilitating and serving to UK tech firms scale, each at house and overseas. Over 20 cohorts and 600 firms have efficiently graduated from Tech Nation’s development programmes.

Tech Nation’s development programmes are designed to champion and assist ‘the UK’s most distinctive deep tech scaleups’ and alumni embrace Skyscanner, Darktrace, and Monzo. The programme fashioned a part of the UK Authorities’s AI Sector Deal, supported by the Workplace for AI.