Building a SaaS Company in Biotech with Abhishek Jha

In our conversation with Abhishek Jha, Co-Founder and CEO of Elucidata, we talk about what it takes to build a SaaS company in biotech, the impact of AI on life sciences, & the prerequisites to build a startup. Abhishek and I discuss his journey as an academic scientist to Agios Pharmaceuticals to founding Elucidata in 2015.

From his journey, a key quote is that “life doesn’t let you do a control experiment.” While making the transition from academia to industry, Abhishek was also exploring D.E. Shaw, where he would have probably stayed to this day, and Elucidata might have never been started. While at Agios, Abhishek was enabling the entire organization with data and spent a lot of time cleaning up data for drug developers. Elucidata was founded as an extension of this work. Data scientists often spend 80% of their time cleaning up data and 20% doing analysis. Elucidata’s mission is to flip that and let their customers spend more time on analysis. Elucidata’s focus was as a product company from day one. We talk about what it takes to build a software company in biotech, given the constraints on the number of customers, and the value of services in the beginning to find product-market fit (PMF). Agios was Elucidata’s first customer, with customers funding product development in the early days. Bootstrapping to find PMF forced Elucidata to make products customers will pay for.

After raising a friends & family round, Elucidata’s growth began to pick up where the company works with 4 out of the top 10 biopharma companies and is the market leader for structuring genomic data particularly RNA-seq (bulk and single-cell) with emerging products in proteomics and other -omics. Their products focus on NLP and data engineering to standardize data sets across life sciences. A comparable company is Fivetran, a data aggregator for enterprises.

For SaaS in biotech, there is a balance between building versus buying, and as a startup developing complementary products without initially competing against your customers. At the end of the conversation, we talk about the need for a strong support structure behind you to found a successful startup. For Abhishek, startups are “one of the best self-improvement processes.” And Elucidata is just getting started. For example, Fivetran took a few years beyond hypergrowth due to the technical difficulties of structuring large, diverse datasets. Following that trajectory, Elucidata is just getting started.