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EQT has announced that the EQT Healthcare Growth Strategy and the EQT Growth Fund have agreed to acquire a majority stake in CluePoints. The management team along with existing shareholders Summit Partners and Clinimetrics SA, which was a co-founder of CluePoints, will be reinvesting. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 2024.1
CluePoints was founded in Belgium in 2012 and is still headquartered there today. The risk-based quality management (RBQM) software provider received an investment from Summit Partners in 2020 and has seen accelerated growth in recent years.
“We are delighted that EQT has chosen to partner with CluePoints. EQT is a market-leading investor in both SaaS (software as a service) and medical research industries. This combination makes EQT an ideal partner for CluePoints which is a market leader for SaaS-based clinical data analytics,” Andy Cooper, CEO of CluePoints said in a press release. “We are grateful for Summit’s active support over the last four years. Their depth of industry knowledge and operational resources have been instrumental in our growth trajectory. Both EQT and Summit share our passion for and commitment to leveraging innovative advanced statistics and machine learning solutions to eliminate manual, error-prone activities in the clinical trial process.”
Earlier in June, CluePoints announced a 3-year extension of its long-standing collaboration with the FDA. The duo identified new objectives to work towards including further enhancement of CluePoints’ SMART software and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning.2
EQT will apply its 30-year track record of investing in healthcare, experience of investing in software and AI, and its in-house digital team and global network of industrial advisors to further accelerate the growth of CluePoints and cement its position as a leader in RBQM and data analytics for clinical trials.
“We are excited to be partnering with CluePoints and its dynamic leadership team to help it scale and reach its full potential. CluePoints’ ambition is a perfect match with ours to help enable the development of medical research to deliver more effective, efficient and accessible healthcare,” Dr. Mark Braganza, partner in the EQT Healthcare Growth advisory team said in the press release.
Kirk Lepke, partner in the EQT Growth advisory team added: “CluePoints is a prime example of how data, machine-learning and AI can be leveraged to improve real world outcomes—in this case pharmaceutical drug development. The entire EQT platform is behind this investment and ready to support CluePoints with its continued expansion in RBQM and into growing, adjacent markets.”
“We’ve been proud to work alongside the entire CluePoints team during a period of meaningful growth and expansion, supporting the acceleration of product development efforts and entry into new markets,” Thomas Tarnowski, a managing director at Summit Partners said in the press release.
Jono Pagden, a principal at Summit, continued: “We are excited to continue our support of CluePoints and to partner with management and EQT during this next phase of growth.”
References
1. EQT to acquire majority position to support the growth of CluePoints, a leading provider of AI-powered software solutions used for data interrogation and analytics in clinical trials. News release. Cision PR Newswire. June 12, 2024. Accessed June 13, 2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eqt-to-acquire-majority-position-to-support-the-growth-of-cluepoints-a-leading-provider-of-ai-powered-software-solutions-used-for-data-interrogation-and-analytics-in-clinical-trials-302170600.html
2. FDA And CluePoints Sign New 3 Year Cooperative Research And Development Agreement To Assess Data Quality Using Statistical Modelling And Machine Learning. News release. CluePoints. June 5, 2024. Accessed June 13, 2024. https://cluepoints.com/fda-and-cluepoints-sign-new-3-year-cooperative-research-and-development-agreement-to-assess-data-quality-using-statistical-modelling-and-machine-learning/