Illustration: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios
PurpleLab, a fast-growing health care data and analytics platform, is exploring a sale, five sources tell Sarah.
What’s happening: A TripleTree-run sale process is underway for the Wayne, Pennsylvania-based business, sources say.
- PurpleLab has fielded significant inbound interest, one source says, while another adds that initial bids are due around the end of next week.
- The company is marketing forward ARR of around $35 million, sources say.
- Estimated GAAP revenue for 2022 is in the $20 million range, more than double the $10 million generated in 2021, they say.
State of play: This week saw large checks written at the intersection of data and health care.
- Thomas H. Lee Partners yesterday inked what Axios learned was a $1.5 billion-plus deal for Intelligent Medical Objects, a data insights company.
- Also this week, Sixth Street invested $150 million in ConcertAI, valuing the oncology-focused real-world data and SaaS startup at $1.9 billion.
- From Komodo to Datavant to MMIT, big funds are backing all types of players focused on unlocking value from health care data.
Flashback: Edison Partners in August 2019 invested $3 million in growth financing in PurpleLab.
How it works: PurpleLab collects, cleans up and stores clinical and claims data that is ultimately used by different health care stakeholders for various purposes.
- “The problem today is that clinical data that you pull from EMRs is basically unstructured and you just can’t run any analytics on it,” one source says.
- As a self-service model, life sciences customers can take PurpleLab's third-party data and make their own queries around it.
Yes, and: Today PurpleLab largely focuses on real-world data (RWD) insights for life sciences companies, but the payer and provider end-markets present opportunities.
- In life sciences alone, pharma companies are deploying big sums of capital for drug research, and data can be used to do everything from identifying new therapies to figuring out where to target spending for marketing purposes.
What we’re watching: There’s a big universe of strategic buyers attacking the health care data problem in different ways, many of which could be interested in PurpleLab, but is now the right time for a strategic sale?
- A number of growth-focused investors that play in data science and analytics might see a big runway to continue to turbocharge its growth as an independent company.
The bottom line: Whether you’re a life sciences organization, a provider or a health plan, data is power. PurpleLab and TripleTree did not return Axios’ requests for comment.