Rivia’s $15m Series A to improve patient outcomes

Experts estimate it costs $2-3 billion to bring a successful drug to market, more than double what it was 10-years ago. Increased regulatory burden, higher failure rates and greater operational complexity have all contributed to this steep inflation which ultimately hurts the patients in need. Within the complex drug discovery value chain, broken data infrastructure is one the key points of failure. Trial complexity has skyrocketed, on average 3.5m data points are collected per trial, and legacy infrastructure can’t keep up. Fragmented data silo’s prevent real-time insights, and legacy frameworks fail to meet scientific needs when it comes to speed, accuracy and interpretability. This is where Rivia steps in – building an AI native data engine to reduce wastage, improve patient outcomes and power the future of clinical trial intelligence.

Founded in 2022 by Erik Scalfaro and Tiago Kielgher, Rivia is on a mission to fix the broken data infrastructure within clinical trials. The product today is positioned as a data engine, transforming vast amounts of unstructured trial data (e.g. on-site patient data, imaging data, qualitative reports etc.) into a structured and scalable architecture. Rivia applies clinical specific knowledge to this dataset to contextualise and compute insights, enabling operators to answer complex clinical questions through native language prompts. The end results is that users are empowered to effortlessly run analysis that previously would have required significant manual work. This foundation is already delivering real-world ROI for customers – core users are spending 200+ hours per month in the platform with estimates of 5-10% in clinical trial cost savings as a result ($5-10m of potential savings). These figures will only improve, as the future product roadmap promises agentic workflows solving deeper needs for trial operators and increasing levels of automation.

We were introduced to the team by our friends at Speedinvest and realised within a matter of days that we wanted to support them on this journey. This is a huge addressable market with the potential to build a category leading business from Europe (the team is based in Zurich, a global biopharma hub only rivalled by Boston). Not only were the metrics best-in-class for a Series A, with strong capital efficient growth and having achieved a lot with a small 11-FTE team, we also felt a strong personal bond with Erik and Tiago. They are high energy, high determination founders who want to build a category defining business, and we believe they have all the tools needed to succeed.

After a competitive and rapid fundraising process, we were overjoyed to get the call-up from Erik on Christmas eve saying he wanted to partner with us for the future – the best Christmas present we could have hoped for! We are investing alongside Earlybird in this $15m Series A, joining existing investors SpeedInvest, Amino Collective and Nina Capital. This is our first investment at Defiant and a key milestone for both us as a team, and for Rivia as a company. We both have a bright future, much to prove, and the ambition to build something exceptional.