Auxilius grows 800%, raises $10M to scale clinical trial financial management

TL;DR – we’ve raised an additional $10M (led by SignalFire) to scale our industry-leading Clinical Trial Financial Management platform. After a year of rapid growth and broad industry adoption, we are fired up to move and build even faster as we continue to fulfill our vision: to remove financial complexity and risk from drug development to help bring more life-changing therapeutics to market cost effectively.

If you’ve got a few more minutes…

I’m excited to announce that Auxilius has raised an additional $10M, led by SignalFire, and with participation from XYZ, Renegade Partners, and CP Overture, joining ranks with earlier investors including Bain Capital Ventures and over a dozen angels who have supported Auxilius from day 1. The additional capital will solidify our position as a leader in Clinical Trial Financial Management (CTFM).

Raising capital is not a thing worth celebrating in and of itself. 800% revenue growth in 2023 and the value we’re driving for over 50 customers is. None of this would have been possible without such an incredible team (now over 30 “Auxen” strong!), or without partnership of our earliest customers. But the biggest reason we’ve been able to establish the Auxilius platform as an essential part of the biopharma tech stack so quickly is because we are solving a real and massive problem.

The Life Sciences industry manages $250B in clinical R&D spend manually, in excel

A few months ago, we were late in a sales process and needed sign-off from the CFO. She joined a final product demo, and a lightbulb went off almost instantly. She just ‘got it’. In her words, it seemed so simple: “wait, why did we just buy Workday Adaptive when we are managing 70% of our budget outside of the system?” This is more than a favorite anecdote – it’s emblematic of a fundamental imbalance: the Life Sciences industry spends over $50B on software and IT, but manages the single largest (and most important) part of their P&L outside of these systems. 

It’s almost hard to believe. This industry is drowning in clinical tools (CTMS, EDC, etc.), and finance and accounting teams are equipped with a mature and evolving tech stack (ERP, FP&A, P2P, Close Management). But if you go one level below the surface, there is a massive gap between systems. The reason almost seems obvious: clinical tools weren’t built for finance, and financial software wasn’t built to handle the complexity of clinical trials. 

And so $250B in clinical trial spend is being managed in cumbersome, 30-tab excel trackers.

The Life Sciences industry deserves needs tools built for Life Sciences

Many of us at Auxilius are excel junkies at heart, but its limitations in this context are glaring. Even with the most sophisticated excel models, it’s difficult to answer three simple but essential questions: (1) “what should I expect to happen in my study?”, (2) “what actually happened in my study?” and (3) “what’s driving the difference between expectations and reality?” 
 
Finance and accounting teams have to answer these questions every month. They own the numbers. And yet answering these questions well requires the integration of data across clinical and financial systems (often siloed or inaccessible), and coordination across dozens of internal and external stakeholders. And for sponsors subject to public market and/or auditor scrutiny, these questions need to be answered using consistently applied methodologies with documented processes and controls. 

Our customers recognize that if you can’t answer these questions well, it’s nearly impossible to sufficiently manage costs, vendors, risk, and runway. For clinical-stage Biotechs living fundraise to fundraise, this is existential risk. For Pharma, it’s extremely costly.

The new standard for Clinical Trial Financial Management

We are proud to be working with over 50 innovative Biopharma companies who rely on Auxilius to streamline core finance and accounting workflows, improve clinical R&D forecast accuracy, hold outsourced vendors accountable, and drive insights that optimize trial success and mitigate risk.

The impact we are having with customers is exciting:

• Customers have experienced a 75% reduction in time spent on monthly accounting tasks,
• 40% improvement in study budget accuracy, and
• Significant cost savings (80% of Auxilius customers identify vendor billing mistakes in their first 60 days on platform)

It's only the beginning

Additional capital will allow us to serve a rapidly growing customer base and expand our platform to support customers more broadly in all stages of the drug development lifecycle: from planning and procurement through close out, and from preclinical + manufacturing through commercial launch and beyond.

Nearly everything it takes to bring a drug to market is hard and unpredictable. Finance and accounting leaders should be equipped to play a role in mitigating both operational complexity and cost, at every stage at the drug development lifecycle. 

This industry has simply accepted that trials are both risky and expensive. We believe that both can be managed. It just takes the right tools – tools built for the Life Sciences industry, and built for operational and financial complexity, not science alone.  

If you’re as passionate about this topic as we are (or stuck in excel), we’d love to hear from you. 

As always, I'm grateful to our investors, customers, and partners for your shared convictions and continued support. Together, we will remove financial complexity and risk from clinical R&D to help get more life-changing drugs to market cost effectively.

For more information, get in touch with our team or follow Auxilius on Linkedin. 

Adam, CEO and co-founder