Case studies from our present and past clients.
Headquartered in Santiago, Chile, GeneproDX is a pioneering medical diagnostics company focused on the early detection and prevention of thyroid cancer. The company's goal is to prevent thousands of unnecessary thyroid cancer surgeries every year. This will save billions of dollars each year in the US alone - not to mention the improvement to patients’ quality of life by avoiding unnecessary surgery and recovery.
Through leveraging advanced AI algorithms, GeneproDX has created a unique, low-cost yet highly accurate diagnostic. It can be offered as a simple kit, designed to detect thyroid cancer. To date, the company has received US $10M in funding and completed its phase one trials in the United States and Chile. However, getting the company off the ground was no easy feat.
The Challenge…
Traditionally, upon detection of a thyroid mass, patients are referred to an endocrinologist. An ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNA) is ordered in which cells are extracted and tested, and a clinical pathologist reads the cytology preparation and issues a report.If the result is positive or indeterminate (meaning that it is unknown whether the tumor is malignant or benign), surgery is required. Approximately 20% of patients receive an ‘indeterminate’ result that requires the thyroid be removed. Post-surgery tests carried out by doctors have shown that in 80% of cases when an indeterminate tumor is removed, the tumor is not actually cancerous, and the surgery was redundant. This leads to thousands of unnecessary thyroid surgeries per year. In the US alone, we estimated that these unnecessary surgeries cost over US$1.6B per year.
In 2014, Dr. Hernan Gonzalez, a cancer surgeon from Chile, had an idea to make thyroid cancer detection more efficient. To explore this idea, he received US $500K in funding from the Chilean Government to develop what was nothing more than a mere concept. At this point, pre-clinical trials hadn’t even started. However, Dr. Gonzalez was confident. He knew that to move forward he would need guidance to develop his value proposition, understand his competition and approach his market value chain correctly. In addition, the Chilean market was too small. If he really wanted to develop his idea, Dr. Gonzalez needed to figure out how to navigate the larger US and European markets, and potentially even apply his knowledge to developing the business in Latin America. Dr. Gonzalez engaged Qanopy to address these challenges.
The Solution…
During discovery, Qanopy uncovered that medical diagnostics company, Veracyte, would be a major competitor. Our research uncovered though that Veracyte’s test was extremely time-consuming, complex, and inaccurate. By using a more efficient algorithm, Dr. Gonzalez was able to produce a more accurate result by testing fewer genes. Even more vitally, instead of having to wait for the results to be sent off to a lab and tested by an endocrinologist, Dr.Gonzalez’s method allowed the test to be done by a general practitioner, in any clinic. Once we fully understood our value proposition and had solved the technical problem, the next step was to solve the business problem by pulling everything together and leveraging contacts in Silicon Valley. Qanopy contacted similar startup companies, venture capitalists, industry associations and large diagnostics companies in order to formulate our strategy and investment pitch. Our research culminated in outreach to 50 contacts located in Silicon Valley and across the United States to find candidates interested in Dr. Gonzalez’s research.
The Result…
As the project was still in its initial stages and the company was not yet incorporated in the United States, we were unable to attract investment in Silicon Valley. We quickly realized that the Chilean market was a prime candidate though.
After partnering to develop a comprehensive value proposition and business plan, we contactedChilean Venture Capital firms as well as the Chilean Government. The results?We successfully raised capital to establish the first CLIA laboratory in Chile.Dr. Gonzalez has since completed his phase one trials and commercially launched the service in Chile. He has since completed phase one trials in the UnitedStates and is exploring several partnership opportunities to take the kit to market in the United States.
RingCentral is a leading all-in-one phone, team messaging and video conferencing solution, designed to help businesses simplify their communications processes. RingCentral has now become synonymous with cloud communications in the United States – but this was not always the case…
The Challenge…
Historically, small-to-medium-sized companies would buy a piece of equipment called a PrivateBank Exchange (PBX). This would offer services such as extension dialing, voicemail, call forwarding, and auto-attendants. The rise of Voice over IP(VoIP) made it possible to access these services from a network, which made the process more cost-effective. At the time, competition was fierce in the sector and RingCentral did not yet have a strong brand presence. When I joined the team, RingCentral had devised a proposition for acquiring small business customers direct through Google Search. This would allow for organic growth – but not the rapid expansion that we needed. So far, the company had its A Round of ~$5M. However, to obtain what it needed in the B Round, it would need to show growth. If we wanted to scale the business enough, we needed to identify and develop a strategic partner network. Our goal was to go after Tier1 telecommunications companies. To start, we focused on companies in theEuropean market to prevent conflict with existing US businesses.
The Solution…
The first step was to pinpoint the need. Up to this point, many telecommunications companies had invested heavily in VoIP technology with little results. Historically, large phone companies have been good at reaching their biggest customers (other large companies) through selling data pipes (T1s,-3). Meanwhile, they have been successful in reaching the consumer segment (for services such as mobile contracts) through traditional advertising mediums. However, something that many companies struggled with was selling business voice services directly to small businesses. The common practice was for big phone companies around the world to work through channel partners known as ‘system integrators’ or ‘interconnects’ to provide these services to small businesses. The phone company would sell the voice or data pipe and then the interconnect would buy a PBX from outside companies and integrate them. The customer relationship was typically between the system interconnect and the small business. Meanwhile, the telecommunications company interfaced with the interconnect. The customer and the telecommunications company had no contact.We identified that there was a huge need to enable phone companies to cut out the middleman and reach their small business customers directly.
The Result…
To implement this, the first step for RingCentral was to determine the best geographic location to test the idea. We wanted to avoid conflict with the existing business in the US, but we also needed to prove our model. After assessing various English-speaking markets, we decided to focus on the United Kingdom. Next, we needed to identify a large strategic partner for growth. We ultimately decided to focus on BT due to the size of their business, their customer base, and their communications network. BT was the major player in the UK. However, it had started to face increased competition. Furthermore, BT did not invest in building out its mobile network. What it really wanted was to grow the fixed line business services sector. RingCentral was a good potential fit for this problem. They would allow BT to deploy new services quickly while getting more direct feedback from both their customers and RingCentral’s technical support and web-based customer acquisition model. This was vital for BT if they wanted to avoid becoming irrelevant in the growing cloud-based, IP-centric market. The key was to understand the value chain and come up with a unique approach that would show quantifiable benefits to both sides. Once we were confident that we could achieve this, we had to find both an executive sponsor and an operations manager within BT to push things forward. It was vital that we took small steps. Rather than do a nation-wide roll-out, we focused on doing a pilot in the London area in order to negotiate on details such as the services to be delivered, the end-user ownership, and the pricing. Ultimately, the pilot was a success and led to a larger future roll-out. However, more importantly, this relationship resulted in an over-subscribed $12M Series B led by tier 1 VC’s Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. RingCentral went public in 2014. Today, it has a market cap of over $1B.