Just processed by the SEC on this bright Friday afternoon: TraceLink, a software-as-a-service platform for tracking pharmaceuticals and trying to weed out counterfeit prescription drugs in the process, has raised $60 million in Series D funding.
The filing shows that 18 firms participated, including, presumably, Goldman Sachs, whose growth equity arm had led the company’s $51.5 million Series C round roughly 18 months ago. Others of the nine-year-old company’s earlier investors include FirstMark Capital, Volition Capital and F-Prime Capital.
As TC’s Jordan Crook reported at the time of that last round, TraceLink helps pharma companies comply with country-specific track-and-trace requirements through their supply chain, which has grown increasingly important following the passage of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act in 2013. The consumer-protection measure aims to protect consumers from exposure to drugs that could be counterfeit, stolen, contaminated or otherwise harmful.
At the time of its enactment, it also gave the industry one decade before unit-level traceability becomes enforced, meaning the clock is ticking.
Also working in the favor of TraceLink: opioids, whose spread has been rising since the late ’90s, creating ever-growing pressure to isolate vulnerabilities in the pharmaceutical supply chain.
Little wonder the company looks to be preparing for life as a publicly traded company, including by releasing quarterly revenue and customer growth numbers. Indeed, according to its “growth highlights,” released just a couple of weeks ago, the company’s first quarter revenue in 2018 was 69 percent higher than it was in the first quarter of 2017.