Clinverse closes $3.8 million Series B round of funding

Clinverse, Inc., the global cloud-based ecommerce platform provider for clinical trials, announced today that it has closed a $3.8 million Series B round of funding led by Hatteras Venture Partners of Durham, NC. Vital Financial of Bethesda, MD, also participated in this funding round.

Clinverse will use the funds to expand market penetration, adding to its already impressive customer list of biopharma leaders, clinical research organizations (CROs), and other innovators in the clinical trials industry. These companies use ClinPay™, the financial management software application from Clinverse that dramatically improves the payments process to clinical trial investigator sites and other service providers. By streamlining the transactions, ClinPay™ improves accuracy and reduces the cost of managing financial transactions through its patent-pending, highly secure, robust cloud-based architecture. The funds will also be used to launch and develop new products that are natural extensions to meet existing and future customer ecommerce needs.

"We are excited to partner with the team at Clinverse," said Hatteras general partner and co-founder John Crumpler. "The company has already solved one of the biggest challenges to biopharma companies of all sizes, which is paying investigators to perform clinical trials. Our confidence is based on their opportunities for growth and a management team that has experienced the problems they are solving. They are uniquely positioned in that they offer the only secure data-pod technology solution that is commercially available and in use by customers to manage the financial and administrative complexities of clinical trials."

"Now making our second investment in Clinverse, we continue to be impressed with the robustness of its cloud-based technology and the high quality, highly interested customers using their platform," said Vital Financial principal Nathaniel Brinn.

Clinverse's market is the $70 billion paid annually to service providers to perform clinical trials. Drugs and medical devices that improve and save lives are approved only after rigorous clinical trials that can last many years and involve many organizations. Among these service providers are health professionals on the investigator site team, labs, biopharma companies, CROs, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs).

Clinverse CEO Tim Immel said, "We appreciate the support and confidence Hatteras and Vital have placed in us. The additional resources from this investment will help us increase value to our customers, and we are excited to continue delivering solutions to meet the wide range of ecommerce needs across the clinical trials industry."

Research shows that up to a third of the time for conducting clinical trials is spent on administration and financial management that still is largely error-prone, manual and dependent on cobbled-together software systems. The lag time for payment is a key complaint among the investigator site teams conducting the clinical research. Investigator sites have said they are sometimes owed tens of thousands of dollars per trial in payments that are overdue by more than six months. In contrast, ClinPay™ provides real-time information on costs and automates the process of payment to the investigators. With global payment capabilities that can manage investigator site payments in 140 currencies, the software electronically tracks investigator grants and compares agreements with trial operational data to make accurate payments to investigators for completed patient procedures. Site satisfaction and retention are important outcomes of on-time reimbursements.

The clinical trials industry is also facing increased regulatory requirements related to investigator site payments as mandated in the Affordable Care Act of 2010 which became law in March 2010. A timely solution, the ClinPay™ software provides sponsors with the financial management capabilities to capture the required regulatory data that clinical trials are expected to start collecting in January 2013 and begin reporting to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in March 2014.

Source: Clinverse