The pharmaceutical industry has made incredible strides in recent years to develop developing life-changing therapeutics for many diseases, offering new hope to patients and their families. But while innovative therapeutics in biologics and cell and gene therapies have tremendous potential, they’re also meaningfully more complex and costly to manufacture compared to traditional small molecule drugs. These challenges are magnified by a manufacturing process that has traditionally relied on manual, paper-based processes or legacy systems, making it extremely difficult for companies to adapt their on-premises systems to meet the requirements to produce these new drugs. Apprentice aims to change all that, and that’s why we’re excited to be leading their $65M funding round alongside our friends at Alkeon Capital and Insight Partners.
When we first met Angelo Stracquatanio, Apprentice’s CEO, and co-founder, we were immediately captivated by his enthusiasm and passion to tackle this growing problem in modern pharma manufacturing. Angelo founded the company in 2014, inspired by his wife who experienced the difficulties of navigating the archaic processes firsthand while working in pharmaceutical manufacturing. From that experience, Apprentice was born—a next-generation, cloud-based, all-in-one solution for life sciences manufacturing that enables streamlined, collaborative, and flexible processes.
We believe Apprentice's Tempo Manufacturing Cloud platform is a powerful solution transforming the operations of pharma companies of all types—from global manufacturers like Bristol Myers Squibb to innovative biotechs like Synthego—helping them "get from drug discovery to patient delivery faster." Apprentice’s technology provides a comprehensive suite of capabilities such as augmented workflow execution, resource management, and virtual collaboration to improve operations at the manufacturing site level. Tempo allows manufacturers to coordinate the materials, equipment, recipes, and personnel needed to plan, execute, test, and release a batch from one shared system. It can also connect all sites involved in production together to view, manage, and accelerate the end-to-end drug lifecycle.
Apprentice has emerged at a critical moment in the evolution of the pharma manufacturing technology market. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for manufacturers to update their technology to remain agile and productive amid supply chain disruptions and increasingly decentralized and distributed teams. In addition to helping customers maintain on-time delivery of life-saving therapeutics through challenging times, Apprentice also adds immense value by enabling fast and cost-efficient new site deployments with meaningfully lower capex compared to legacy systems, while promoting accuracy, speed, and compliance throughout the manufacturing process.
ICONIQ Growth is thrilled to partner with Angelo and the entire Apprentice team to support their mission of bringing all stages of drug production into one platform to turn molecules into medicine. Apprentice represents a powerful addition to our family of best-in-class healthcare IT companies including Benchling, Devoted Health, GoodRx, Komodo Health, Nayya, Notable Health, QGenda, Reify Health, Twin Health and Unite Us. If you’re building a ground-breaking company in the healthcare space, we’d love to hear from you.
Published:
March 20, 2023