I recently had an inspiring conversation with a student from Stanford about how different the world would be if the brilliant minds working on startups were brought together to solve global problems.
Justin’s insight stayed with me. Ironically, I’d just interviewed William King, the Founder and CEO of Zephyr Health, who’s doing just that.
I like to think about Zephyr Health as the missing link in the health industry. Founded and bootstrapped by William in 2011, the San Francisco startup’s ultimate goal is to gather, connect, and curate the most important health data for medical providers and pharmaceutical companies.
In turn, the data empowers traditionally operating medical organizations to optimize their practices.
According to William, it currently costs pharmaceutical companies up to $5 billion to research a drug, over a period ranging up to 10 years, resulting in a success rate less than 4%.
As we reflect on the on-demand laundry services and artificial intelligence personal assistants that drastically simplify our lives, it’s only fitting that a team of brilliant engineers and leaders would champion a similar opportunity for efficiency in the health industry.
There’s a notion of hot and cold data – What data counts at what point in time?
Zephyr Health’s ultimate goal is to empower life sciences companies with data that’s curated, targeted, and connected. As a result, companies can conduct smarter experiments and bring life-changing drugs to market faster and cheaper.
Whether they’re organizing data from different sources in the cloud or curating a list of individuals in need of clinical trials, the Zephyr Health team learned early on that their customers needed simple and elegantly presented information.
Today the team’s taking an even more integrated approach with their mobile app Voyager, which they released in March.
Voyager is designed to enable real-time communication between medical professionals on site and in the lab.
Instead of waiting days and relying multiple, often fragmented, mediums to communicate potentially life changing findings, Voyager makes it simple to actively share insights with the rest of the team.
They’re moving towards instrumentation of the business in real time.
Put simply, Zephyr Health is helping large pharmaceutical companies with R&D and storing all the data in the cloud. Think of the team as the smartest kid in biology class (the teacher’s practically made them the TA), who shares his or her color coordinated, 20 page study guide with the rest of the class; Making your only job to ace the exam.
It’s undeniable that Zephyr Health’s future is bright. After announcing their recent partnership with Veeva OpenKey Partners and Voyager, the team’s next task is to tackle predictive analytics.
To learn more about Zephyr Health’s mission to connect the health industry tune into William’s episode of 33founders and follow the team on Twitter here.