Mendel: Doubling Down on AI & RWE

By Kyle Lui, Partner at DCM

As many parts of the world start to recover from the pandemic (while in many countries, the virus is still very much a daily threat), I continue to be amazed at the wonder of science and technology. In less than 2 years, a number of companies (Pfizer, Moderna and J&J amongst them), driven by necessity and innovation, have released vaccines that appear to be incredibly effective against one of the most disruptive global pandemics in recent human history. It is undeniable that Real World Evidence (RWE) played an important role in accelerating vaccine approvals and proving its effectiveness in the real world. To make sense of clinical data, companies often employ clinical research nurses or outsource to companies that employ “clinical abstractors” who sometimes spend hours on a single patient’s record to draw inferences based on their medical history. To fulfill the promise of RWE, how will R&D teams scalably process complex clinical records when most of this data is unstructured and requires highly specialized knowledge?

Enter Mendel. Mendel’s clinical AI platform understands unstructured, natural language content in the same way that a trained human would interpret the data. Something that takes a human hours to process would only take Mendel’s platform a matter of seconds. I first invested in Mendel in 2017 when I wrote a piece on “AI eating the world.” Since then, Mendel has seen explosive growth. Last year alone, the company processed 10M patient records (for comparison, a well-known company that employs a huge number of human abstractors took five years to process 2M patient records). Since commercially launching last year, Mendel has maintained a 100% conversion rate from pilot to paid contract. Their customer list is impressive and diverse, including a global top-3 pharma company, several high growth oncology research companies and one of the world’s best known academic research institutions. That’s why DCM is thrilled to double down on Mendel and lead their $18M Series A round, along with Olive Tree Capital, Zola Global Investors and Millennium Technology Value Partners. I’m delighted to continue my close partnership with Karim Galil and Wael Salloum in the next phase of Mendel’s growth.

Not surprisingly, they’re actively hiring!