Axtria, a unicorn that provides data analytics tools and software support for global pharma industry, is planning to recruit around 1,000 software engineers and data analysts in India in the next couple of years as part of its expansion plans, according to its co-Founder and CEO Jaswinder Chadha. The firm, founded by two India-born entrepreneurs in the US, grew by 50 per cent in the last year and recently raised $150 million from Bain Capital for this expansion, Chadha told BusinessLine from the US in a call.

30-50 per cent growth

Axtria, currently valued at $1 billion, already has 1,800 people in its offices in Bengaluru, Gurugram and Noida. “We want to be the best and biggest data analytics and software firm based out of India,” he said. The firm, which raked in a revenue of $150 million in the previous year, has been growing at 30-50 per cent in the last several years, Chadha claimed.

Axtria software products and cloud services are used by most global pharma companies, including those in India that are focused on global market. “If you look at any pharma company, for every product that gets approved, the threshold for the standards getting the product approved is so high that it is nothing short of a miracle drug. However, the biggest problem once the drug is approved is finding the right patient. Using data analytics, we go through claims data, epidemiology data and patient data to find the right treatment centres where the patients who would benefit from this particular drug go,” said Chadha.

That way the firm helps both the companies as well as the patients – the companies to get to the right patients and the patients to get the right drugs, said Chadha, who founded the company with his brother Navdeep Chadha, about 10 years ago. “Our software tools are currently used in 50 countries. The drugs and pharmaceuticals market globally is $1 trillion and typically these companies spend 20 per cent of their revenues on commercialisation, which is essentially sales and marketing,” said Chadha who has more than two decades of domain expertise in pharmaceutical industry.

“What we are trying to do is optimise that $200 billion spend using data analytics and cloud software that we have developed," he said. This market, Chadha said, is around $5 billion.

One of the biggest speciality areas in the last 10 years has been cancer. Axtria currently works with 80 per cent oncology product companies in the world. “We are the brains, the analytic engines, and the business planning platforms for these firms to reach their drugs in the hands of the patients,” he said. The firms use these software platforms to do business planning such as forecasting how many patients will use their drugs, where to distribute the drugs, or how many sales representatives they need among others, said Chadha.

An area Axtria is focusing on now is drugs for rare diseases. “Rare diseases by definition mean that very few people suffer from these diseases. Finding these patients is like looking for a tiny needle in the haystack,” Chadha said.

Pharma industry is the most innovative industry in the world. “Microsoft is still selling the same Office, Google is still making money from its searches. GE is selling the same aircraft engines. Their revenues from the same products do not go to zero. Pharma industry, on the other hand, has to constantly invent new products because blockbuster drugs would become generics 10 years later,” he said. “About 5-10 years ago, we had to make a big bet that oncology is going to be the big market. Today it is rare diseases. We have to be in the forefront of where the pharma industry is going in the next three to five years. That is the biggest risk and biggest opportunity for us in our business,” Chadha said.

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