Comprehend today announced it has secured $21 million in Series B financing to accelerate clinical development through its cloud-based business intelligence solutions, enabling life science companies to bring new treatments and devices to market faster and more affordably. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with support from existing investor Sequoia Capital. Lightspeed partner Peter Nieh joined the company's board of directors.

'Life science companies spend more than $4 billion to bring a single product to market, largely because they cannot access the information they needed to manage their clinical trials,' said Peter Nieh, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. 'Comprehend's analytical solutions enable life science companies to execute the clinical research process in a fundamentally new way, and the market is responding with great enthusiasm.'

Comprehend offers a new approach that provides universal access to clinical trial data and analytics, enabling all stakeholders ' from the C-level to clinical operations to data management to clinical monitors ' to access up-to-date information about all aspects of their clinical development operations. As a result, Comprehend integrates the silos that traditionally have hindered the clinical development process, leading to more effective trials, increased collaboration and auditability, and drastically reduced research timelines and study costs for drug and device companies of all sizes.

In the past year, Comprehend has increased its customer base by more than 100 percent, with new additions to its client roster including Boston Scientific, Karyopharm, MERGE, Atlantic Research Group and Versartis. The company will use the new round of capital to expand its product development and customer solutions teams to further develop its cloud-based business intelligence solution.

'With a management and customer services team that truly understands today's clinical development challenges, Comprehend is filling a critical unmet need and driving change in an industry that's desperate for innovation,' said Sharon Shacham, Ph.D., MBA, president and chief scientific officer, Karyopharm Therapeutics Inc.

To accommodate its growing team, Comprehend moved its headquarters to Redwood City, Calif. last year. Looking ahead, Comprehend expects to increase its staff by 80 percent and will continue to heavily invest in product R&D, sales and marketing, and its support services.

'The ability to analyze clinical data in a timely and comprehensive way is completely changing the clinical process and the way new treatments come to market. Comprehend is at the center of that shift,' said Rick Morrison, CEO of Comprehend. 'This latest round of funding further validates our approach to redefining clinical operations, risk-based monitoring, adaptive trials, performance and execution metrics, and clinical trials as a whole. Ultimately, we're enabling more patients to get the critical treatments they need sooner.'

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About Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners (http://lsvp.com) is a leading venture capital firm with over $2 billion of committed capital under management and investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, India, Israel and China with Lightspeed China Partners. Over the past two decades, Lightspeed partners have backed more than 200 consumer and enterprise, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including Blue Nile, Brocade, Ciena, DoubleClick, eHealth, Fusion-io, Informatica, Nest Labs, Nicira, Nimble Storage, SnapChat and Riverbed Technology.

About Comprehend Systems, Inc.

Comprehend Systems, Inc. (www.comprehend.com) offers cloud-based clinical data insights tools that improve the way clinical researchers access, understand, explore and analyze data. Designed specifically for life sciences, Comprehend Clinical „¢ enables data managers, monitors and clinical operations executives to identify broad operational and clinical trends across trials and also easily drill down and report on a wide range of factors, including safety issues, regulatory requirements and opportunities for critical time and cost savings. Comprehend Systems was founded in 2010 in Palo Alto by a team of entrepreneurs with decades of combined experience in clinical research and software development.