Two years ago, when raising its $1.6 million seed round, Toronto-based SaaS and AI startup Odaia was focused on productizing its customer engagement platform. Two years and another funding round later, the startup has publicly launched its platform, targeted toward the pharmaceutical sector.
“Our ultimate goal here is to shrink the time required in order to find the right patients to get for certain therapeutics.”
The platform, called Maptual, launched in early 2021 and provides pharmaceutical companies insights to better engage with customers. Odaia says Maptual integrates data from all customer touchpoints, including prescription transactions, to give pharmaceutical companies real-time, personalized insights and actions.
Philip Poulidis, CEO and co-founder of Odaia, told BetaKit the startup was initially looking at multiple industry segments where it could apply its technology. Founded in 2018 out of the University of Toronto, Odaia uses process mining, customer journey mapping, and artificial intelligence to deliver sales and marketing insights and process automation tools to enterprise companies. The startup has placed its bets on pharma as its core vertical, with Poulidis telling BetaKit the sector now makes up 95 percent of Odaia’s focus.
“Our ultimate goal here is to shrink the time required in order to find the right patients to get for certain therapeutics,” Poulidis said. “At the end of the day, we’re looking to make the sales engine within pharma much more efficient than it has traditionally been.”
The launch of Maptual came several months after Odaia raised a previously unannounced $4 million in seed funding in November, consisting primarily of follow-on capital from past investors and a few new angels. One notable new angel investor was Michael Cloutier, former CEO of AstraZeneca Canada, a multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology firm.
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Odaia had previously raised a seed round in 2019, and Poulidis said this new round came at a higher valuation. Startups labelling multiple rounds as seed funding prior to a Series A has become a common development in Canadian tech.
Poulidis said the startup sought to raise financing last year after seeing success on its core offering with several pharma companies, which led Odaia to want to scale up its commercial efforts. The proceeds from that fundraise were intended to support Odaia’s engineering efforts and help roll out new products and features, including Maptual.
Poulidis said Maptual is currently being used by four of the 10 largest global pharmaceutical companies. Though Odaia’s current core focus is on pharma, Poulidis said the startup is exploring the use of its platform in other market segments, including e-commerce.
Odaia is also looking to add new features to its pharma platform. Poulidis said Odaia’s core offering is primarily meant for the “back office,” meaning teams that are working within commercial operations, brand planning, and marketing teams.
He said companies are requesting for the platform to be useable by sales representatives in the field, allowing them to have use Odaia’s predictive insights and integrate those into their strategies. The startup is planning to launch a “sales rep portal” in the coming months.
Image source Unsplash. Photo by Headway.