SAN DIEGO – Ruminating on a radical pivot away from her work in consulting and background in auditing and accounting, Jennifer Kyle decamped to Peru.
Kyle, the founder and CEO of Condor Software, didn’t know a single engineer, anyone who had previously founded a tech company or how to raise funding from investors. She was considering launching her own company to develop a more efficient end to end method of navigating the costs for clinical trials.
“I was consulting for a number of companies,” she said. “And when I was looking in the market for software to replace my spreadsheets, there were none.”
On a trip to Peru she was inspired by the Andean Condor and noticed there were some common themes that reminded her of what the solution should look like.
The Andean condor, a national symbol in multiple South American companies including Peru, has one of the widest wingspans of any bird, one of the highest flight altitudes, 20/20 vision and is one of the longest-living birds in nature, with a lifespan upwards of 70 years. Those aspects – comprehensiveness, wide-ranging and long-term vision and longevity – became foundational principles for the company, according to Kyle.
“Since day one of naming Condor, all of the decisions that we’ve made in the product have been, ‘is this going to create value? Is this going to help them not run out of money?’” she said. “We need to make sure that we’re covering all of the costs and we need to be able to give them that high-level view (while) drilling into the details.”
Condor’s financial cloud platform enables biotech, biopharma and life sciences companies to monitor their research and development costs, model and analyze financial data and estimate the costs of clinical trials.
Whereas other software companies in the life sciences space provide data management software for clinical trials and commercialization, respectively, Kyle said Condor filled a market gap by providing a cloud platform for life science financial management and planning, much of which has been done in Excel in the recent past.
“Your business driver is your clinical development program, so you’re raising hundreds of millions of dollars on the longshot that it’s all going to work out,” she said. “There was no technology solution in the market that could tell you how much anything’s going to cost.”
Since launching in 2020, Condor has reached the ability to predict clinical trial costs, which escalate and become harder to forecast as trial phases become more complex with larger groups of patients, with an accuracy of between 95% and 98%.
Kyle sees the company’s sweet spot in the life sciences industry among clinical-stage companies and commercial biopharma companies.
“As you get closer to commercial, you’re looking at long-range planning. What’s the value of the drug when it’s on the market, and how much is it going to cost to get there?” she said. “Because you’re going to have a lot of clinical trials that are going to fail along the way, and you have to capture those costs.”
Kyle is a former auditor with Ernst & Young who audited several biotech companies in the San Diego area and thought at one time that she wanted to become a CFO. That desire shifted as she climbed the corporate ladder.
She subsequently became a financial consultant for biopharma and life science companies, including a then-fledgling Mirati Therapeutics Inc., which was acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb for $4.8 billion in 2023.
After deciding in early 2020 to launch Condor, Kyle said she spent two years spending “a lot of money on the wrong people and the wrong development,” before raising a seed funding round in 2022 and finally getting the company on the right track to ship its financial management cloud in late 2023.
While Condor has since expanded its platform to offer comprehensive budgeting, expense forecasting and automation of tasks like vendor reconciliation and contract adjustments, the initial version was primarily centered around tracking and analyzing clinical costs. That initial focus on an unflashy task allowed Condor to quickly gain a foothold among customers, Kyle said.
“If the market seems large and gets enough buzz, then why don't industry incumbents just build it? It’s got to be enough to move the needle on their annual revenues,” she said “In the very early days, we entered in through accounting. Who’s going to build an accounting solution just for clinical accruals?”
Condor’s growth has been explosive since then, she said, to the extent that the company is entertaining new fundraising opportunities just to keep up with demand from the large pharmaceutical companies that have expressed interest in the company’s platform. The company has more than 150 active users, and is growing rapidly.
“The financial health of the company is strong,” Kyle said. “The impetus of the raise here is because we can’t build fast enough to keep up with customer demand."
Kyle said the passion behind the company boils down to ensuring that costs aren’t a barrier to developing therapeutics that will save patient lives, treat rare diseases and keep drug costs down.
To that end, biotech and pharmaceutical innovation are driven mainly by science and finance.
“Even though we can’t predict the science, we can absolutely tell you how much it’s going to cost,” she said. “And (help) these biotech companies from the earliest stages all the way through, really financially plan and think more strategically about how they allocate capital and resources to give them the best advantage to succeed.”
