Exclusive: Komodo is betting that its MapLab tool can upend how healthcare data are analyzed

Health tech unicorn Komodo Health is betting big that its latest development can disrupt how healthcare data are analyzed and put to use.

Called MapLab, the tool takes data that Komodo’s aggregated over the years and analyzes them so that pharma companies can run research on different patient demographic breakdowns, prescription trends and other queries that can help understand who pharma companies are trying to reach with their particular medications. Ideally, this replaces the work consultants have to do manually on behalf of large pharma companies.

Arif Nathoo, Komodo’s CEO, told Endpoints News that this will be the company’s primary application going forward.

“Imagine if you knew which parts of the population were not getting access to therapies, can we do something about it faster, better for them,” Nathoo said. “That’s the stuff that this really enables and gives me the tingles because this is the realization of nine years of work on it.”

Founded in 2014, San Francisco-based Komodo has raised $514 million to date, most recently raising $200 million from investors in November 2022. The $3.3 billion company had reportedly planned to go public in 2022 before scrapping those plans.

Amid a tougher digital health market, companies like Komodo will have to find ways to be indispensable to the healthcare industry. Komodo’s betting MapLab will be able to do that.

Since its start, Komodo has been aggregating data and building tools that break down what patients in the US healthcare system are experiencing. With MapLab, Nathoo said, the aim is to address questions life sciences companies might want answered as they bring new treatments to market.

Nathoo and co-founder Web Sun started Komodo after working as industry consultants and saw up close how pharma companies would spend millions on consultants who would answer questions those companies had about how to reach the right people with a particular treatment.

Jorge Conde

Jorge Conde, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which led Komodo’s Series C round in 2020, previously worked at biotech companies. He told Endpoints that the solutions Komodo has been building toward are ones he wished he had while trying to commercialize a medication.

“I remember when I first met them. This is one of those investments where I thought in a previous life, I would have been an eager customer and an avid user of this product if it existed,” Conde said.

Rather than asking a person to spend time writing up a presentation and gathering data points about a particular market, the aim is for MapLab to use generative AI to bring insights in a more simplified way that doesn’t require advanced training.

“When you put the three of those together: We have the data, you have the tools for analysis and visualization, and now the actual intelligence to ride alongside you, to help you draw better insights,” Conde said. “I think that’s what’s going to make this work.”

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