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Life Sciences Recruitment Site Clora Raises $3.3 Million To Accelerate New Therapies

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Courtesy of Clora

It often takes about 14 years and $2 billion to develop a drug and get it into the hands of doctors and patients. However, a marketplace with enough breadth and quality of talent could dramatically reduce this cost.

This is the premise of Clora, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup that raised its first $3.3 million seed round with the aim of helping life sciences companies hire the right talent quickly. The round, announced on Thursday, was led by Spark Capital and joined by Social Capital, Ludlow Ventures, iSeed Ventures and Notation Capital, among others. The startup is a platform that matches life sciences companies with on-demand expertise, claiming to complete placements about 10 times faster than traditional recruitment methods at about 30% of the cost. Clora generates revenue by taking a commission for each hire made through its platform, typically of about 20% per project, substantially lower than the cost of traditional recruiting services. Clora is free for candidates, and employers pay if they hire a Clora-produced match.

It can take hundreds of different -- and constantly changing -- skillsets to bring a product to market. So life sciences companies constantly struggle to fill open roles with the appropriate, highly-specialized expertise, often leaving half of available roles unfilled at any given time. And they waste resources reviewing options across staffers’ personal networks and social networks that aren’t fits.

“Companies are taking longer and longer to develop new life-altering therapies, thanks to technical and regulatory challenges, and they’re facing pressure to reduce the cost,” Clora CEO Rahul Chaturvedi said in a phone interview. “There’s significant underutilization with these skilled experts that are sitting on the sidelines, waiting to be called up, because companies don’t have a great way of finding them.”

“The goal is to apply technology to change how this entire industry works so that we’re able to get new products to market faster and far more cost effectively to patients,” he added.

Clora uses its proprietary algorithms to match employers of a range of sizes -- from startups to big pharmaceutical companies -- with individuals in its pool of thousands of candidates (the company isn’t disclosing specific figures). Every candidate is vetted to appear on the platform, and the typical job candidate on Clora has more than nine years of experience, often as regulatory strategists, data managers, medical writers, clinical project managers, biostatisticians or biochemists.

Companies across the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries can hire candidates for a range of job durations. Employers can indicate which candidate attributes, such as therapeutic area, product expertise, education, skills and location, are most important. Clora’s search engine filters for companies’ precise project requirements and duration, and within a week, are matched with up to three qualified candidates.

“We’re organizing and providing access to the world’s life sciences expertise with the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Chaturvedi.

Clora plans to use its seed round to build out its artificial intelligence backbone and market its service. Before founding Clora in 2016, Chaturvedi gained about 15 years of life sciences industry experience, serving previously as vice president in clinical development, most recently at Kaleido Biosciences in Boston. Clora's second cofounder Leaya Martelli, has two decades of recruitment experience, most recently in biotechnology. The duo launched the platform in March 2017 and now has a team of about 10. The startup plans to double in headcount over the next year.

“To date I’ve been involved in six product approvals and have seen first hand a number of the inefficiencies that exist in the industry that have held us back for decades and can be tackled with technology,” Chaturvedi said.

Successful online consumer marketplaces such as Thumbtack, Uber and Lyft help offer a model of how businesses like Clora can leverage marketplaces to fill their needs, according to Spark Capital senior associate John Melas-Kyriazi.

“As a consumer, think about all of the easy ways you can sort talent on-demand,” Melas-Kyriazi said. “For a business in certain industries, it’s still super difficult to find the right talent at the right time. We see Clora as an opportunity to play in the life sciences market, but with a strategy we recognize from consumer tech.”

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