When I founded Qualio in 2012, I set out to create a platform that would enable companies to build with quality and speed. In the years since, it's been incredible to witness how this message has resonated with customers, recently leading us to the milestones of 250 inspirational customers and 100 amazing teammates. With that growth has come many learnings about who our customers are and how we can go further, faster to ensure their success.

Backed by world-class investors

Today, we get to celebrate another milestone. Qualio has raised $50M in Series B funding led by Tiger Global. Menlo Ventures also participated in this round, joined by existing investors, including Storm Ventures, MHS Capital, Sorenson Ventures, and Frontline Ventures. Adding to our $11M Series A raised during the first half of 2020, we are now well on our way to becoming the trusted quality platform for the entire life sciences ecosystem.

This capital will allow us to support more customers than ever before in ways that only a company like Qualio can and will push us towards our goal of enabling 100,000 teams to launch and scale life-saving products.

Why now?

As stated eloquently by Y Combinator, "a revolution is happening in life sciences that is reminiscent of what happened in software since the '90s." This change goes way beyond the massive wave of digital transformation that is sweeping the world's most prominent pharma, biotech, and medical device companies. We see three forces shaping this revolution - changing demographics, the emerging ecosystem, and recognizing that speed matters.

Changing demographics: The lessons learned in the software world are now being applied directly in biology, leading to an explosion in the number of companies working on solving some of the world's biggest healthcare problems. In addition to building 10x better versions of existing products, small teams are creating new categories in areas like digital therapeutics, personalized medicine, computational biology, Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), and AI platforms.

Connected ecosystem: We are also seeing a move towards an ecosystem model. Companies specialize in different parts of the supply chain and partner together to bring life-saving products to market and successfully scale distribution. This ecosystem expands beyond the critical external partners that companies depend on and includes the critical data systems they need to integrate to make the right decisions. The most prominent recent example of this is the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, and you'll find more examples almost everywhere you look.

Speed matters: One of the biggest lessons learned in 2020 is that speed matters when it comes to designing, testing, manufacturing, and distributing life-saving products. And an industry that has been known for decade-long product development cycles is now working aggressively to shorten cycles and launch products to those who need them much quicker than ever before.

These forces are creating companies that have a new set of needs than the status quo. They are highly networked, depend on a new tech stack, and need to move at a velocity never before seen in this industry. It represents a different paradigm from what the industry has operated on for over 100 years. It also represents a set of challenges that Qualio is uniquely capable of solving and one of the reasons why we've experienced such growth over the past two years.

Customer success is our #1 priority

Everything starts and ends with our amazing customers. Companies already trust Qualio in 19 countries, and we're doubling down on our goal of enabling 100,000 teams to launch and scale life-saving products. Here are a just a few:

ArcScan - a medical device manufacturer that builds high-resolution ultrasonic imaging devices to improve diagnostic and surgical outcomes for ophthalmology patients 

FifthEye - a software as medical device (SaMD) company that detects hemodynamic status from a single streaming lead of ECG, reliably predicting impending hemodynamic instability minutes to hours and sometimes even days in advance

4G Clinical - a technology company that’s disrupting how clinical trials are run so that customers can bring medicines to market faster.

Building the trusted quality platform

When it comes to the products that we put in and on our bodies to treat disease and safeguard our health, we need to trust that they are safe, effective, and work consistently. That is the promise of quality. It's a co-equal promise to the Hippocratic oath taken by medical doctors, where part of their oath includes the phrase "at first do no harm." In this way, quality is a synonym for trust. What we're doing at Qualio is increasing trust, which is the cornerstone of success in healthcare.

We are investing heavily in substantially improving our existing products and building new products to support our evolving customer needs. Priority focus areas include accelerating product design and development, connecting the life sciences ecosystem, and uniting the twelve pillars of quality so that companies can scale quickly with quality.

Accelerate product development: Deeply integrating product development with quality so that product, engineering, and quality teams can work as true partners for the first time.

Connect the ecosystem: Using our unique position as the only product used across the entire life sciences ecosystem to make it easy to find, onboard, and collaborate with all your external partners.

Twelve pillars of quality: Continue to streamline and deeply integrate the 12-pillars of quality to ensure that customers can operate audit-ready at all times. We want the "no observation" audits that our customers experience to become the expected behavior for all quality-driven companies.

We're building a global, world-class team.

We've believed for a long time that culture and competency matter more than geography. We were a remote company before COVID, and we are making a long-term bet that the future of work is distributed. Today, we're lucky to have over 100 amazing Qualians. And after finally getting to meet some of our new team members located in the San Francisco Bay area this past week, I was reminded about how fortunate I am to get to work with them all.

We're a team of collaborative high-performers that are intensely mission-driven. In the next 18-months, we will be more than tripling our team size as we work hard to scale every function to meet the enormous growth in demand as the life sciences revolution takes off.

Join the team at Qualio

In addition to building a global business, I’m proud to be part of a team that reacted in March 2020 to support companies fighting COVID-19, and launched our 1% for all life giving pledge to increase healthcare access for those who need it most.

We are in a unique position to empower the most important industry of the coming decade as it goes through unprecedented change. We see a future where the products we put in and on our bodies to improve our lives can be developed and launched with incredible speed and absolute trust in their quality.