The wheels are flying today for Flywheel. The biomedical research data management company has picked up $22 million from the likes of Novartis' digital health venture group and is using some of those funds to buy Radiologics.
Minneapolis-based Flywheel secured the series C funds from 8VC, Argonautic Ventures and more than half a dozen other venture outlets, including Novartis' dRx Capital, which has backed Science 37, Pear Therapeutics and other health tech upstarts. The company said it expects to receive more financing "in the coming weeks."
In conjunction with the financing, Flywheel is spinning its wheels down to St. Louis to acquire Radiologics, the company said Wednesday.
"Our goal is to power accelerated R&D in oncology, radiology and other therapeutic areas where innovation is paramount and increasingly data-driven," said Jim Olson, Flywheel CEO, in a statement.
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The goal of the merger is to ramp up the speed of clinical trials, improve biomedical research and get to the discovery stage quicker, said Dan Marcus, Ph.D., CEO of Radiologics and now chief scientific officer of the combined company, in a statement.
Flywheel's machine learning and cloud data management platform are used by life sciences and biopharma companies, academic institutions and clinical research sites. The platform is used for research collaboration, multicenter studies, artificial intelligence development in imaging research and clinical trials.
Medical technology company Siemens Healthineers, applied radiomics startup HealthMyne, AI medical imaging firm Imbio and Google Cloud are some of Flywheel's partners.
The company was founded in 2015 by Brian Wandell, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging at Stanford University, in partnership with startup incubator Invenshure.
Prior to the series C, Flywheel raised a $15 million series B in February and an $8.5 million series A in 2019.