Cota, a healthcare data and analytics company focused on empowering healthcare providers to deliver precision medicine, has raised $40 million in Series C financing, with plans to expand its staff and operations, advance its disease classification system, and scale up its solutions across providers, payers, and life sciences companies.
“We're poised to expand our team and add new capabilities to support the company's rapid growth,” Cota CEO John Hervey said in a statement.
Cota—whose name initially stood for “Cancer Outcomes Tracking and Analysis”—said it would also use the funding to advance its Cota Nodal Address (CNA) system, a digital classification technology designed to enrich medical records by creating research-grade data and combining it with a suite of analysis, visualization, and management tools.
CNA is based on Cota’s “real-world evidence” datasets, designed for use by life science companies to broaden the effectiveness and lower the costs of clinical trials by expanding the application of precise clinical data. The platform has been created to take in data from any electronic health records (EHR) system and many clinical systems, using HL7 and FHIR connections, as well as CSV, JSON, XML files, and API calls.
While CNA covers all serious diseases, Cota says, the system has been commercially launched first in oncology. According to Cota, CNA is the first system to enable precision medicine at scale by precisely categorizing patient factors, their diseases and intended therapies.
“With our CNA classification system and powerful analytics, we are confident that Cota will revolutionize both patient care and healthcare economics,” Hervey added. “Moreover, the depth and richness of our real-world evidence set empowers life sciences companies to gain new insights into their compounds, accelerate market applications and support clinical trials.”
According to Crunchbase, the Series C financing brings the amount of capital raised by Cota since it was founded in 2011 by Andrew Pecora, MD, the company’s executive chairman, to $65 million. Cota raised $18 million in Series B financing in 2016, and $7 million in Series A funding in 2014.
“CNAs embody all that is relevant and unique about a person, their disease, and intent of care, allowing precision medicine to be bridged to population health,” Pecora said. “We have proven that CNAs enable patients to get optimal care and improve outcomes, while payers see greater efficiencies and less waste, thus reducing total cost of care.”
Iqvia led the financing round, Cota said, in return for securing a seat on Cota’s board. EW Healthcare Partners offered what Cota termed “major” participation in the financing—which attracted one prominent new investor, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), and several existing Cota investors that included Boston Millennia Partners, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, Hackensack Meridian Health, and Atoc Holdings.
In November, MSK inked a multi-year partnership with Cota whose value was undisclosed. MSK agreed to provide Cota with anonymized clinical data, while Cota agreed to use CNA to construct optimized clinical and genomic datasets from the MSK records, with the goal of improving the cancer center’s patient care. The partners also agreed to form a technology collaboration focused on advanced analytics to enable more consistent disease classification within oncology,
“Cota occupies a unique place in the healthcare ecosystem, benefitting payers, providers, and life sciences companies with its proprietary capabilities,” added Steve Wiggins, managing director at EW Healthcare Partners. “They are uniquely positioned to advance drug development as well as value-based payment arrangements—initially in oncology and eventually in other specialties.”