Florence Healthcare has raised $27 million to expand its clinical trial document management software business.
Atlanta, Georgia-based Florence completed the Series C-1 funding round this week with New York venture capital fund, Insight Partners, leading the investments. Florence said the money would go toward hiring more staff, enhancing product offerings and accelerating connectivity across its global network of clinical trial sites and sponsors.
"With this funding, we're strengthening our position as the research platform for the remote-work era,” CEO Ryan Jones said, adding the platform currently hosts more than 100 million research documents and is used in 45 countries.
Florence’s previous fundraising round in May last year raised $80 million with, in addition to Insight Partners, Fulcrum Equity Partners, Bee Partners and Flashpoint all taking part.
Florence's core document management technology, called the eBinders platform, is a digitization system for trial paperwork that, according to the firm, simplifies remote start-up, monitoring and source data review. The system is used by more than 10,000 sites worldwide. In addition, Florence recently claimed that 80% of U.S. residents live within 25 miles of a Florence-equipped site.
For clinical trial officer Catherine Gregor, the new funds and expansion of Florence’s research site network will benefit trial sponsors and CRO partners, particularly with regard to patient recruitment.
“These new patient access points will allow faster enrollment and increased diversity among trial participants, and that means drugs and devices will have a safety profile more inclusive of the patients they will treat," Gregor said. “Additionally, increased representation in study participants will help sponsors better meet the evolving guidelines for regulatory approval."
Florence has been pushing the potential benefits of digital document management for some time. In January, Florence said demand for faster patient enrollment combined with increased use of decentralized, hybrid or site-free trials models has seen more sponsors and CROs opt for digital management systems.