Ostra joins Calder Health

Ostra has been acquired by Calder Health. The sale closed this week, and the team in Boston will continue to run the business inside Calder’s clinical research division. The terms are private.

When we first met the founders, the company was three people and a spreadsheet of hospital sites. Their observation was simple. Most clinical trials miss their enrolment targets, and the cause is rarely a shortage of eligible patients. It is that the patients are spread across many hospitals whose records were never designed to be searched for them. A trial would open, a handful of sites would recruit slowly, and the study would run months late at enormous cost.

Ostra built the plumbing to fix that. Its software reads a hospital’s records under the hospital’s own controls, flags patients who may qualify for a trial, and puts them in front of the right clinician, without the data leaving the hospital. That last point took two years to get right and was the reason hospitals said yes.

What the team achieved

By the time of the sale, Ostra was working with research sites in eleven countries and had helped enrol patients into more than 300 trials. Studies using it typically reached their recruitment targets in about half the time. Those numbers matter less to us than what sits behind them: treatments reaching patients sooner because the trials that tested them finished on time.

We backed Ostra early, from Fund III, and invested again in each of its later rounds. It was not a straight line. In its third year the company lost its largest customer and had to rebuild its sales approach almost from scratch. The founders did that without losing a single member of their engineering team, which told us a good deal about how they ran the place.

Calder Health has the reach into pharmaceutical research that Ostra would have taken another decade to build alone. We think it is a good home, and we are proud to have backed the company from the start.

Our thanks to the founders, to everyone who worked at Ostra, and to the hospitals that trusted it early.