February 9, 2021, 07:00 AM Eastern Standard Time BOSTON -- Clora Inc., the best place to discover, build, and manage on-demand life science teams, announced today that it has acquired Legit.ai, an AI-powered expert network focused on biopharma expertise, in a cash and stock deal.
“This acquisition allows us to accelerate our ability to organize and deploy worldwide life sciences expertise at a time of unprecedented growth in our industry,'' said Clora CEO, Rahul Chaturvedi. “We are excited to expand the capabilities of our product in response to the growing needs of our customers.”
Over the last several years, Clora’s marketplace has grown to a community of thousands of suppliers and hundreds of top-tier biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies together developing life-altering therapies. Clora’s software has enabled access to higher quality on-demand talent at 70% of the costs of most traditional recruitment methods.
Legit successfully grew out of the Kendall Square biotech cluster with the mission to connect on-demand life-sciences experts to biopharma companies in order to answer deep technical questions. The Legit team built a proprietary Natural Language Processing engine to identify the right expert for a task by mining 40 million scientific publications, patents, and clinical trials as well as 2.1 million expert profiles. Eniac Ventures-backed Legit in 2018 and, since then, Legit has worked with enterprise customers like Johnson & Johnson to identify and connect with specialized expertise on-demand faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional expert networks.
By combining the two companies, Clora will continue to expand its global talent operations within the life sciences by creating the industry’s leading marketplace of industry professionals. “It takes us even closer to our goal of being able to support all of our customers’ talent needs across the lifecycle of product development,” commented Chaturvedi.
This is a significant milestone for the Boston-based startup, which was founded in 2017 by Rahul Chaturvedi, a former head of clinical development at Kaleido Biosciences and Avedro.
A number of former Legit employees will be joining the Clora team, including Legit CEO and Founder, Matt Osman. He will join as Clora’s new VP of Strategy. “I am thrilled to be joining Clora, as we share a commitment to solving talent gaps and bottlenecks to accelerate drug development and lower drug prices,” said Osman. “We can’t wait to get to work integrating our product and using our technology to help fill critical expertise gaps for Clora’s customers”.
The acquisition further positions Clora as a global leader in the on-demand life science talent market, which is a space expected to grow to $162bn globally by 2025, at a time when biotech and pharma companies are increasingly looking for flexible and specialized solutions to serve their diverse talent needs.
About Clora, Inc
Clora's two-sided marketplace uses data models to help life science companies find, qualify, and connect with top-tier life science experts for their most critical development priorities. They make the process of finding the right expertise fast, reliable, and more cost-effective in order to meaningfully reduce the time it takes for life-improving therapies to get to patients.
Collectively, Clora's investors have backed Twitter, Slack, Wayfair, Box, Tumblr, Foursquare, Postmates, Warby Parker, Ginkgo Bioworks, and many others.
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About Legit.ai
Legit is an AI-powered expert network that uses Natural Language Processing to match users with on-demand life sciences expertise in a two-sided marketplace.
Legit was backed by Eniac Ventures, Elementum VC, and Cantos Ventures along with leading angels with AI and healthcare experience.
