Albion Ventures has led a substantial investment in Aridhia Informatics, a health and biomedical informatics company.
Founder investor Scottish Equity Partners (SEP) also participated in the round.
Headquartered in Edinburgh, Aridhia was founded in 2008 by Dr David Sibbald OBE and Professor Andrew Morris, dean and professor of medicine at the University of Dundee, Scotland and renowned internationally for his research on diabetes and the use of healthcare informatics in clinical health provision.
Aridhia has an informatics platform with cutting-edge analytical tools to support healthcare and research. It has established an international client base and a network of major strategic partners.
Aridhia’s informatics platform integrates very large and complex datasets so as to make meaningful and flexible analysis possible while addressing the unique complexities of healthcare.
The platform uses big data analytics to understand the relationship between healthcare events and serves two main customer needs: the effective management of chronic diseases today; and the shift to stratified medicine in the future, where a patient’s molecular profile is used to tailor preventative measures or treatments based on the likelihood of response to treatment.
Aridhia’s Clinical Analytics application maximises the use of existing data to provide healthcare professionals with insights into the quality of care delivered to a patient population with one or more chronic diseases and monitors the impact on clinical outcomes.
The company’s stratified medicine and research product, Research Analytics, is a research-focused collaborative environment where owners of clinical and genetic data and researchers can analyse large, complex datasets to aid knowledge transfer from research to clinical practice, whilst ensuring patient confidentiality.
Over time the secure data flow between these clinical and research applications will allow chronic diseases to be treated at a personal level by incorporating the use of genomic data and other molecular data.
Aridhia’s client base includes the Ministry of Health of Kuwait, NHS Scotland, several Academic Health Science Networks in the UK and other healthcare providers internationally. Its network of strategic partners includes Pivotal, a provider of application and data infrastructure software; and global life sciences company Life Technologies, with which Aridhia is collaborating to support the Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre.
Dr Andrew Elder, partner and head of healthcare at Albion Ventures, says: “We are delighted to be investing in Aridhia, a high growth business that is ideally placed to benefit from the increasingly urgent need to combat chronic disease, the shift to stratified medicine and the application of ‘big data’ analysis. We have invested in the healthcare IT space for several years and Aridhia represents one of the best opportunities we have seen to date in the sector. Aridhia benefits from a strong, proven team and a platform that has been validated by several high quality customers and collaboration partners. We are delighted to be partnering with the team and look forward to supporting its continued growth.”
Dr David Sibbald, co-founder and chief executive of Aridhia, says: “We are excited to have gained the backing of Albion whose expertise in the healthcare IT sector convinced us that they would be ideal partners. Given our ambitious growth plans and the size of the opportunity, it was important to partner with a firm that had both the financial resources and a clear vision of how the market will evolve. We now look forward to working closely with Albion and SEP as we turn our vision of expansion into reality.”
Jan Rutherford, partner at SEP, says: “Aridhia is the leading European company in its field. As chronic disease is increasing in prevalence globally, we are delighted to continue to support the business as it rolls out its core platform of ground breaking informatics and analytics services.”
