Why Novellia thinks the best biopharma data strategy starts with patients, not pipelines
“Everything that’s good for patients delivers extraordinary value for biopharma - that overlap is the entire company,” says Shashi Shankar, CEO. From symptom tracking to AI-driven normalization, Novellia builds patient-first data infrastructure that scales into biopharma-grade intelligence.
Since we last spoke, could you give us an overview of how things have developed at Novellia in terms of patient growth, data scale, and enterprise adoption?
The biggest change since we last spoke is that we’ve reached a new level of trust, both with patients and with biopharma partners.
On the enterprise side, we’ve doubled the number of companies working with us entirely through word of mouth. We’ve done zero advertising, very limited marketing, and yet we’ve seen incredible pull from existing partners who are expanding and introducing us to others. Our customers span Top-20 pharma and several emerging biopharmas, which I think speaks to how valuable our solution is to virtually all types of biopharma companies. That growth has been organic because our partners see sustained patient engagement and data quality that improves over time, and not one-off datasets like you typically see with syndicated RWE vendors.
On the patient side, growth has accelerated alongside usage. In 2025, we grew our medical records exponentially with an increase of nearly 90x , and that number—now deep in the millions—continues to climb. Importantly, this is a story not purely about data volume. The real takeaway is Novellia users are now contributing richer, more longitudinal data as they actively use our product to manage their own health.
That combination—patients who stay engaged because the product helps them, and biopharma partners who benefit from higher-fidelity, continuously improving data—is what gives us confidence heading into 2026 as we scale more intentionally.
When it comes to deciding your internal direction, how do you balance your commitment to patient-centric data with the B2B partnership side?
First, we always, always prioritize what’s best for patients. It’s central to our mission and we believe it’s high time a data company put patients first. From there, it comes down to alignment. We talk a lot internally about the overlap between what creates value for patients and what creates value for our biopharma customers. That overlap in the Venn diagram is where Novellia exists.
Historically, many data vendors focused only on customer value and ignored the patient altogether. We flipped that. We ask: what do patients actually need? And we build from there. And what we’ve seen is that everything that’s good for patients delivers extraordinary value for biopharma.
Take symptom tracking. We did hundreds of user research sessions and learned that patients were struggling with managing symptoms. They would use their Notes app to log things like, “I had a headache at 3 p.m.”, or “sharp stomach pain at 4 p.m.”. So we launched a very intuitive symptom tracking tool without any marketing or ad campaigns. And almost overnight, it became one of the most-used features in the product.
For patients, that means clarity and continuity in their own care. For biopharma, it means access to structured, longitudinal insight into the lived experience of disease—outside the clinic walls. That’s the kind of real-world evidence that improves trial design, contextualizes outcomes, and ultimately supports better therapeutic decisions.
