As the global strategy manager for a global pharmaceutical company, Michelle Wu found herself working nights and weekends to combine different data excel spreadsheets, reading through various websites and documents, trying to find useful information for strategic decisions.

“I struggled day in and day out to find useful insights from clinical trials, so we could accelerate our go-to-market time,” Wu says. “At the same time, patients were dying waiting for a cure. On average, it takes six analysts and three months to aggregate just a comprehensive analysis for a single molecule. That's a lot of time wasted. So I left Novartis to build NyquistData™ because I want to solve this universal pain point for this industry.”

Using AI to accelerate clinical trials

Wu and her tech cofounder, KK, built their startup NyquistData™ to enable companies to gain insights from prior knowledge, accelerate their own product development, and speed up their go-to market time.

Life science is a huge sector, with few players in data technology. “The market is enormous–more than $200 billion,” says Wu. “By cutting through the clinical trials and the FDA approval timeline, NyquistData will fundamentally change the life science industry.”

NyquistData is an all-in-one AI platform that aggregates unstructured data from regulatory and clinical documents, to help companies accelerate their R&D innovation. Wu says the product drives insights from the very beginning of a clinical trial through the whole lifecycle process. Named for the Nyquist Theorem, NyquistData has 25 customers from seven countries, including Medtronic, Becton Dickinson, UCLA, and NXT Biomedical.

“Our platform is the only data provider that hosts data insights from both developed countries and emerging markets, with almost 1 million medical devices at your fingertips,” says Wu. “We empower users with natural language processing technology and original context in local languages so you can navigate uncharted territories with confidence while saving money and resources.”

Wu says it takes at least ten years and $2.6 billion to build an innovative molecule because of the difficulty of accessing unstructured data and gaining prior knowledge from clinical trials. “You go to the U.S. FDA, China FDA, scrape the internet, and the processes to aggregate all those insights are manual, like PowerPoint, Excel spreadsheets, and Microsoft SharePoint,” says Wu. “One month of loss equals $30 million in costs, not to mention patients' lives.”

NyquistData is a conceptual AI search platform, which is different from a generic search from an FDA database–and many FDA databases aren’t searchable at all. NyquistData distills decades of FDA data into a guide for success for companies. Many FDA databases are in silos, so there is a lot of manual work required to sift through the data and piece the data together. NyquistData provides a holistic picture from the very beginning of a product from the clinical trials to approval to supply chain and also the real-world evidence. Companies and innovators can get a holistic picture of a product and strategize their clinical trials and their go-to-market strategy.

The platform analyzes three billion words from over 460,000 research studies in more than 200 countries and runs machine learning algorithms to reduce time to critical insights by 50%, while mitigating quality and safety risks. NyquistData’s AI lets users see inside 40,000+ companies, including new clinical trials, product launches, and manufacturing expansion to real-world evidence. The platform offers geographic modules that cover the U.S., the E.U., Japan, and China, as well as a Clinical Trial module. “One piece of feedback we’ve gotten from customers is that they really like how fast the pages open and the results show up,” says Wu.

NyquistData is already the largest AI platform that aggregates data from the U.S. FDA, the China FDA, the Japan FDA, and the European FDA, providing data on almost one million medical devices. NyquistData uses natural language processing technology and also hosts original context in local languages. It relies on Google Cloud, Google Translate, Google Compute Engine, Google Maps Platform, Google Natural Language AI, Google Recommendations AI, and Google Vertex AI.

NyquistData doesn’t have many direct competitors. Its enterprise SaaS solution combines data analytics, industry insights, and machine learning, at the intersection of medical device research and technology. Many companies still rely on generic search methods, which generate reams of unrelated information and aren’t very efficient. Others depend on consultants, which is costly, time-intensive, and hard to scale.

NyquistData’s diverse team includes Wu, who comes from a commercial background with over a decade of experience in life science and understands her customers’ struggles, and her tech co-founder, KK, who has experience building AI startups and a network of engineers in US, Europe, and Asia.

Participating in Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders Cohort

In September 2021, Wu participated in Google for Startups Accelerator: Women Founders, a ten-week digital accelerator program for women-owned and women-founded startups. The twelve participating startups were selected based on their use of AI/ML to solve their business challenges. Google mentors provided technical project support, with a special focus on product design, customer acquisition, and leadership development for founders. “Our mentors from the Google for Startups Accelerator helped us to refine our objectives and key results (OKRs) and encouraged us to aim for our moonshot,” says KK.

NyquistData entered the Google for Startups Accelerator with a growth goal of $300K in revenue. “We already have 50% of the sales in the bank, and the other 50% is in the procurement process, waiting for the final approval of big life science companies,” says Wu. “We underestimated the lengthy approval process at large enterprises.”

Using Google Ads for promotion and Google Analytics to track results, the company reached 100% of its monthly active users goal, growing from 40 to 75 by week six of Google for Startups Accelerator, which they credit to the sales and marketing sessions with their advisors. They also reached their goal of a 90% customer satisfaction rate. The team was able to land and expand from one to three seats within an enterprise client in four months, and 90% of their customers say they would refer their colleagues to NyquistData, with 13.14% of referrals converting to customers.

With help from their Google mentors, NyquistData greatly improved their searching accuracy. The team also built a system that can learn customers’ feedback to further improve the result.

The best news? The company raised $6 million immediately following the Google for Startups Accelerator Demo Day, more than half of the average seed round and above the industry average valuation. They received a term sheet one day before Demo Day.

What’s next for Nyquist Data

Nyquist Data is currently the leading AI intelligence platform for medical technology and also prides itself on harnessing data for social good. “We are helping life science companies design better clinical trials and advance innovation to care for and cure patients,” Wu says. “We are also supporting companies impacted by current events to find better supply chain solutions.”

The company is working to expand to the pharmaceutical industry, and Wu is confident in NyquistData’s current position in the market. “We have validated the market need and see a clear path to becoming a billion-dollar company,” says Wu. “Being a female founder allows me to look at things from a fresh perspective and bring domain expertise from other countries to the U.S. market.”