Veratrak applies blockchain to pharma supply chains

Digitizing Data

Aiming to improve pharmaceutical manufacturing by applying blockchain to supply chains, London-based Veratrak’s main product is a pharmaceutical industry document collaboration and workflow management platform. Founded in 2018, the software as a service (SaaS) company offers tools that streamline all document exchange processes across vast supplier networks. Veratrak offers solutions purpose-built for the life science industry and is being continuously developed by industry experts, enabling the firm to provide digital solutions that solve unmet market challenges.

By relying on siloed, non-secure email threads and file sharing with a supplier network, companies risk poor document visibility, exposure to cyber crime, increased lead times and much more. Veratrak’s  SaaS platform for the life sciences provides data integrity, efficiency, reduced lead times and the ability to gather invaluable data supply chain operations, according to the company.

When Jason Lacombe and Matthew Wilson co-founded Veratrak, they wanted to enable manufacturers to more easily audit processes, ensuring regulatory compliance and manufacturing quality. The  software provider offers secure and compliant document transfer and facilitates collaboration between supply chain partners to generate efficiencies across operations. With the aim to move companies from paper to platform, the solution was developed by experts and aims to drive a digital transformation to create a safer, more secure future for the industry’s critical supply chains.

Veratrak is supported by an advisory board with vast experience across the pharma industry, as well as insight into the supply chain, packaging, digital operations and new technologies. Co-founding members of the EPOCH initiative, the company is at the forefront of blockchain technology and its use in the pharmaceutical industry to benefit security, collaboration and operational performance.

Veratrak’s platform enables the network to sign, review, authenticate and transmit essential documents throughout the supply chain. Veratrak also offers its clients an “iron-clad audit trail” that generates required documentation beginning at production and ending at the distribution of medication. The program allows users across the supply chain to seamlessly communicate via blockchain,  thus  automatically and securely fulfilling regulatory requirements placed upon pharmaceutical manufacturers, logistics companies, medical professionals and pharmacists.

The company’s ability to provide a critical service in compliance with government mandates sets the company apart from firms like DocuSign. It has a track and trace product with unparalleled functionality. The overall result is increased visibility for supply chain partners and the ability to better react and adjust to events, resulting in better care for patients.

Veratrak CEO and co-founder Jason Lacombe said, “From the inception of Veratrak, we have built our software to be GAMP 5 compliant, to the highest security and quality standards. We have worked alongside users at pharmaceutical and life sciences companies to test our solution and provide feedback on what we are building. There are a variety of cloud-based document management services operating in other industries; however, they are not regulatory compliant for the pharmaceutical industry.”

Lacombe explained that the focus of blockchain companies has been on “serialization” and getting companies ready to meet the European and U.S.’s track and trace regulations. Instead, Veratrak “chose to enter the market via the document sharing use-case, and not the serialization use-case, because the serialization space is already crowded with blockchain.”

Veratrak began with £1 million in seed funding from Force Over Mass, as well as Seedcamp, Ascension Ventures, Blockchain Valley Ventures and TrueSight Ventures. Individual investors include ex-head of Corporate Strategy for Microsoft, Charlie Songhurst, current EVP of Operations at Vectura Group and previous vice president of Global Supply Chain at Baxter, Tony Fitzpatrick and Antonin de Fougerolles, CEO of Evox Therapeutics.

Veratrak charges its customers a monthly per-head license fee. The pricing is volume-based depending on the number of licenses that an organization buys. Lacombe explained that the company also offers all of its paying customers free guest licenses to invite on their external partners to collaborate on document workflows. As he said, “This creates some significant network effects and virality. We have seen this work well with other companies like DocuSign that invite collaborators via email to sign documents.”

Recently, Veratrak announced that it was collaborating with BOMI Group, which operates in the field of logistics and management of advanced technology healthcare products. BOMI offers clients a wide range of tailored services: warehousing, temperature-controlled transport, Home Care solutions and other valued-added services in the supply chain of the healthcare sector.

The company has joined the Integrated Warehouse Project to leverage the industry-wide collaboration platform and move away from peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging between pharmaceutical companies and logistics partners. BOMI Group believes that it will benefit from Veratrak by connecting to the Integrated Warehouse Hub to facilitate better data transfer between it and its HLS partners.

The Integrated Warehouse, a cloud-based hub backed by blockchain technology, is the first ever HLS-LSP decentralized data exchange platform.  Blockchain technology will be used at participating organizations to verify data coming into the Integrated Warehouse message hub, thereby creating a single and irrefutable source of truth for all messages that are shared between Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) companies and Logistics Service Providers (LSPs).

According to Felipe Morgulis, COO at BOMI Group, “We are excited to collaborate with Veratrak and participate in this cross-company collaboration that will streamline our operations and allow for easier integration with our clients. We chose to partner with Veratrak as the Integrated Warehouse Project will provide us the ability to reduce the time required to onboard new customers and leverage anonymized data captured across all participating companies. We are eager to work with Veratrak and the other companies involved and reap the benefits of the Hub and believe we are better positioned now to reach our sustainability goals, optimize our supply chain operations and provide better service for our HLS clients.”

Lacombe said, “We are thrilled to welcome BOMI Group to the Integrated Warehouse Project. We are excited to work with BOMI group and help the company work more efficiently and increase its visibility while capturing data exchanged across its supply chain.”