Vineti Completes $35 Million in Series C Financing to Industrialize Personalized and High-Value Therapeutics


  • A coalition of strategic industry leaders – including Cardinal Health, Novartis Pharma AG, and Kite, a Gilead Company (Gilead Sciences, Inc.) – joins the company’s existing investor syndicate to accelerate commercial reach and new product innovation.
  • Driven by an industry-leading team, Vineti offers an enterprise software platform that orchestrates the scale-up and wide distribution of transformative, personalized therapies for cancer and other serious diseases, from clinical to commercial phases.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 05, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Vineti, Inc., the leading digital platform of record for personalized therapeutics, today announced the closing of a $35 million Series C investment to support further enhancement of the company’s automation and analytics offering, new software product development, and global commercial expansion. The financing is led by Cardinal Health, with participation from Novartis Pharma AG and Kite, a Gilead Company (Gilead Sciences, Inc.), as well as existing Vineti investors – Canaan Partners, Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ), Section 32, LifeForce Capital, Casdin Capital, and Hive Ventures, along with other undisclosed entities. A representative of Cardinal Health will join Vineti’s Board of Directors, and representatives of Novartis and Kite will join as board observers.

The new capital will be used to further expand Vineti’s platform – which is the only platform of record currently enabling both clinical and commercial personalized therapeutics, such as CAR T and allogeneic cell therapies – into other high-value, high-complexity therapeutic supply chains. The funding will also support Vineti’s continued expansion in Europe and Asia-Pacific, providing a global solution to industrialize personalized therapies in clinical through to commercial stage.

Vineti’s coalition of new investors demonstrates the industry’s collective support for scaling the enabling infrastructure required to bring transformative personalized therapies to patients world-wide, as well as recognition that the latest wave of personalized therapeutics requires built-for-purpose platforms and tools to ensure safety, access and cost-effectiveness at scale. Vineti has emerged as the platform and partner of choice in these rapidly expanding markets. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration anticipates that it will approve 10 to 20 advanced therapies a year beginning in 2025. The agency also expects to receive up to 200 clinical trial applications for cell and gene therapies per year, starting now. The more than 1,050 advanced therapy clinical trials now underway worldwide could enroll almost 60,000 patients, according to the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine.

“Those of us with experience in personalized therapeutics understand that innovative technology is required to support breakthrough science,” said Joe DePinto, President of Cardinal Health Specialty Solutions. Mr. DePinto, a veteran of the cell and gene therapy industry, will join Vineti’s Board of Directors. “Cardinal Health has led the industry in partnering with manufacturers to bring cell and gene therapies to market. Our investment in Vineti reflects our continued commitment to targeted medicine and our excitement about collaborating with other industry leaders to support the growth of this exciting field.”

Through their investments in Vineti, Novartis Pharma AG and Kite, a Gilead Company (Gilead Sciences, Inc.) will also be supporting the growth of enabling technology critical for the broad industrialization of personalized therapeutics.

“We are excited to partner with Vineti on its journey to provide the essential technology infrastructure required to scale personalized therapies,” said Neil Tiwari, Managing Director of dRx Capital & CDO Venture Capital, a Novartis investment vehicle. “This requires enterprise-grade solutions that work broadly across the industry as a whole. A successful platform is one that engages all stakeholders: innovators, manufacturers, regulators, clinicians and payers, as Vineti is designed to do.”

“Kite is committed to continuous innovation in platform services and logistics support to improve the cell therapy experience for patients and healthcare professionals,” said Charles Calderaro, Global Head of Technical Operations at Kite. “We are proud to have played a foundational role as Vineti's first biopharma partner as we prepared for the launch of our first CAR T cell therapy and, looking forward, we are equally pleased to support Vineti through this venture investment as it continues to develop enabling software and systems that aid in the commercialization of cell therapies with potential to benefit patients.”

The Vineti software platform is built to move transformative new personalized therapies into mainstream medicine at scale while safeguarding patient safety and regulatory compliance, enabling standardization, and reducing COGS. The platform connects healthcare providers, suppliers, and biopharmaceutical pioneers in a powerful digital network with real-time access to data. Vineti’s cloud-based, fully configurable platform acts as the flexible and transparent “smart plumbing” across the value chain to assure Chain of Identity and Chain of Custody within the most complex supply chain, logistics, reimbursement, and patient-monitoring workflows in the history of biologics. The platform will support clinicians and patients in hundreds of leading medical centers world-wide in 2020.

“We have entered the critical window as an industry to define the standards that will ensure continued growth,” said Amy DuRoss, CEO and Co-Founder at Vineti, “Vineti was built for purpose to serve pioneers in personalized medicine who share this same commitment to industrialization and to redefining what is possible in the next wave of therapeutics. We are humbled and honored to grow Vineti’s leadership with such a world-class syndicate of partners aligned on our shared vision for industrializing personalized medicine.”

The Vineti platform is available directly from Vineti. Biopharmaceutical developers, potential technology partners, patients, and clinicians can learn more at www.vineti.com.

About Vineti
Vineti is the first commercial, configurable cloud-based platform to expand patient access to life-saving cell and gene therapies. Vineti was co-founded by GE and the Mayo Clinic to solve the key challenges that patients, medical providers, biopharmaceutical companies and regulators face in the delivery and commercialization of individualized therapies. Now a fully independent company, Vineti offers a digital platform of record to integrate logistics, manufacturing and clinical data for personalized therapies. The Vineti software solution aligns and orchestrates the cell and gene therapy process and improves product performance overall. The Vineti platform supports the full continuum of patient-specific therapies, including cancer vaccines and autologous and allogeneic therapies. The platform can also be harnessed for drug products requiring companion diagnostics or REMS programs. Vineti is currently serving patients, healthcare providers, and researchers in hundreds of leading medical centers and manufacturing centers world-wide, on behalf of a growing number of biopharmaceutical partners. In 2019, the World Economic Forum honored Vineti as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Vineti is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in Bethesda, Maryland and Yerevan, Armenia. For more information, please visit http://vineti.com.

Media Contact:

Joseph Salerno for Vineti
Director, PR and Scientific Communications
HDMZ, Inc.
joseph.salerno@hdmz.com
312-506-5241