Reify Health hits a $4.8 billion valuation

Reify Health, a Boston-based provider of clinical trials software, pulled in $220 million in Series D funding, pumping its valuation to $4.8 billion.

• The company also launched a 10-year initiative to help research sponsors track enrollment diversity and conduct remote trials in more areas.

Why it matters: Clinical trials are dominated by costly and slow-moving studies run largely by elite, hard-to-access academic medical centers.

• Studies often over-enroll wealthy white patients, limiting the relevance of their findings — and Reify hopes to help.

Details: Altimeter Capital and Coatue co-led the round and were joined by Dragoneer Investment Group and previous backers Iconiq Growth, Adams Street and Battery Ventures.

Context: Several companies are attempting to diversify clinical trials with strategies similar to Reify's — running them in a decentralized fashion, for example, and keeping better track of enrollment demographics.

• Others include Topography Health, which recently raised $21.5 million plan to engage community physicians using a plug-and-play trials platform.
• Reify launched a decade ago and has so far raised roughly $477 million, according to Pitchbook data.

How it works: Reify partners with biopharma companies including Amgen, AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly (as well as health care organizations and research organizations) and gives them access to its cloud-based software tools, which operate under the following business entities:

• StudyTeam: Its enrollment management platform, which gives researchers aggregated reports of recruitment and enrollment metrics by race and ethnicity.
• Care Access: Its decentralized research organization.

What's next: Ahmad Namvargolian, the CEO of Care Access, says he aims to "make diversity, inclusion and representation a foundational element in clinical trials moving forward.”