Talking Medicines raises £1.1m to scale up AI patient tracking

Talking Medicines, a social intelligence company for the pharmaceutical industry, has secured £1.1 million funding deal to scale up its AI-based platform for measuring patient sentiment.

Tern, an investment company specialising in the Internet of Things (“IoT”), is the lead investor in a syndicated funding round alongside The Scottish Investment Bank, Scottish Enterprise’s investment arm.

Led by CEO Jo Halliday alongside co-founders Dr Elizabeth Fairley and Dr Scott Crae, Talking Medicines will use the funds to support the launch and roll-out of a new AI data platform, which will translate what patients are saying into intelligence by providing a global patient confidence score by medicine. As part of these plans, the business intends to immediately recruit 9 new employees to the NLP data tech team.

Formed in 2013 to create new ways of capturing the voice of the patient, the Glasgow-based firm uses a combination of AI, machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tech tools to capture and analyse the conversations and behaviours of patients at home, with the aim of transforming big pharma’s understanding of patient sentiment. Through mapping the patient voice from social media and connected devices to regulated medicine information, it is able to build data points to determine trends and patterns of patient sentiment across medicines.

The round brings the total raised by the firm to £2.5m, including three previous seed funding rounds with previous investors including impact investor SIS Ventures and the Scottish Investment Bank. Talking Medicines CEO Halliday, said: “This investment will scale our team and the development of our AI, ML, NLP tech tools to translate what patients are saying into actionable pharma grade intelligence through our global patient confidence score by medicine.”