SkyCell, the leading manufacturer of data-driven temperature-controlled smart containers for the pharmaceutical industry, has raised $62m in an oversubscribed growth funding round.
The investment was led by MVM Partners LLP together with a consortium of Family Offices and a leading Swiss Insurance Company.
Existing investors including the Swiss Entrepreneurs Fund managed by Credit Suisse and UBS and the BCGE Bank’s growth fund also participated in the round.
The growth funding will be used to expand SkyCell’s global footprint, with particular focus on the US and Asia. This follows an acceleration in business relating to world healthcare concerns as more pharma companies need to protect their crucial supply chains, with Q1 revenues up 3x from the previous year.
Modern pharmaceuticals have changed and are now even more sensitive to temperature changes and other common factors during air transport, such as vibration.
The market is worth around USD 2.8 billion per annum, growing at a rate of 15-20% as the regulatory environment around the world strengthens to place increased responsibility on pharmaceutical companies to ensure products remain viable after transit. Traditional logistics methods have remained largely static during the past few decades, with the market accepting a failure rate of at least 4-12% depending on destination.
SkyCell’s approach brings this right down, reducing complexity through a highly innovative smart container that allows pharma companies to optimise supply chains using data to predict and control risk.
Using over ¾ of a billion data-points on factors like temperature, location and time, it allows the world’s largest pharma companies to enable a market leading and audited failure rate of less than 0.1%, whilst reducing CO2 emissions by almost half.
The company has been validated by 15 of the top 20 pharma companies, eight of whom have rolled out SkyCell’s solution globally.
Richard Ettl, CEO and Co-Founder of SkyCell, comments “We are delighted to have raised this growth funding as we look to extend our operations further into the US and Asia. From the outset, we have been focused on building a technology driven solution that directly solves this problem, whilst also reducing costs and environmental impact.
“In recent months we have seen a further shift, as more pharmaceutical companies turn to us as their primary provider to eliminate risk in the current environment where time is of the essence.”