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Starfire, a company offering an agentic commercial intelligence platform for life science companies, is launching with backing from Redesign Health with the aim of helping pharmaceutical companies commercialize therapies.
"What we do is we really inject the understanding of the subject matter, the expertise of what someone in market access or someone in health outcomes or someone in commercial insights would care about," Starfire CEO Robert Nagel told MobiHealthNews.
"We are not coming to pharmaceutical companies with our own data. We truly believe we should be Switzerland so that [life sciences companies] have the opportunity to have us overlay against all the different types of data, both data they might have procured from another party and data they may produce internally."
The company's technology, which was engineered over the past year with the help of Redesign Health, allows agents to automate complex analyses, including designing and executing large-scale patient journey analyses across numerous cohorts, identifying high-impact intervention points throughout the care journey, and creating cost, outcomes and budget impact models to help with clinical and financial performance.
"We do things like few-shot prompting to really say this is best in class – what you would expect a consulting firm or an analytics team internally to produce, and then let's make sure that we're meeting and exceeding that standard with our agentic system," Nagel said.
Starfire also generates executive-ready presentations, subject-specific recommendations to aid commercialization strategy and analytical artifacts, such as structured datasets, definitions and resulting data tables.
Redesign Health, a company that builds, launches and funds healthcare startups, provided backing to Starfire approximately a year ago and has helped guide the company toward launch.
"Redesign was Starfire's formation capital investor and has definitely completely agreed with the thesis that commercial insights for pharma is an enormous problem," Patrick McDonagh, managing director of new ventures at Redesign Health, told MobiHealthNews.
"We had done a lot of work helping Rob, alongside him, craft and refine the thesis, and think through what the right go-to-market strategy and product offerings were, in addition to the capital. We definitely very much view ourselves as not just capital partners, but also strategic thought partners in the earliest days of the business," McDonagh said.
Redesign Health is on its third fund following the close of a $175 million investment in 2024. The organization has been investing in early-stage healthcare technology companies for nearly eight years.
"We really saw this trend where over the last 10 years you've had a proliferation of healthcare data aggregators and access to healthcare data, which, in theory, would provide opportunity that there's never been before to drive these insights, do it in a timely manner and really democratize access to that intelligence to the actual people that are running the strategy – namely brand leads and market access leads," McDonagh said.
"But no one's really created the tools to actually convert all that data into meaningful insights, and insights that are right at your fingertips, easily analyzable and easily understandable, and that's where Starfire really comes into play."
Nagel said that although Starfire is providing self-directed, systematized insights for companies to access immediately, the company sees that as an anchor point, and, downstream and upstream, it is doing a great deal of workflow automation through agentic systems.
"[Starfire] has a great initial cohort of customers, but we believe the Starfire platform is broadly applicable to any large pharma or small biotech company that has either in-market drugs, but also those that are kind of approaching the initial launch of their first pipeline offering," McDonagh said.
