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Technical.ly
3 days ago
- Business
- Technical.ly
How Lithero is using AI to speed up pharma marketing compliance
Startup profile: Lithero Founded by: Nyron Burke Year founded: 2015 Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA Sector: Life sciences, AI Funding and valuation: $0.68 million raised as of May 2022, according to PitchBook Key ecosystem partners: Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Morgan Lewis, Drexel University, University City Science Center, Broad Street Angels, Ic@3401 In life sciences, everything takes longer. Nyron Burke, cofounder and CEO of the Philadelphia-based AI for life sciences company Lithero, learned that through years of working as a consultant with pharmaceutical companies that were always looking for ways to speed up the process of creating marketing materials. What may seem relatively simple, like a pharmaceutical pamphlet for a doctor's office, can take months to finalize due to compliance issues. The final draft, with its medical language and side effects disclosures, has to be just right, requiring multiple reviews by medical lawyers before it goes to print. It's a stark contrast to consumer marketing, where a marketing professional might be able to create a one-pager in a day. 'With life sciences, that just wasn't possible,' Burke told noting that the extra time it takes to make biotech marketing materials compliant also increases the cost tenfold. Burke founded Lithero in 2015, years before AI became a common part of everyday life. He knew that machine learning could make the process considerably faster by screening for compliance issues before a medical lawyer reviews it, cutting down on the number of reviews — and, crucially, time. 'Divine intervention' led to the development of the engine Before Lithero, Burke spent eight years working for the global professional services company Accenture, with a focus on pharma and biotech companies. 'The three things I spent my consulting career on were speed, cost and compliance in pharma marketing specifically,' he said. 'But with the aspirations that my clients had, I had to not just do a good job, but to fundamentally do something that was transformative.' The speed he wanted for his clients was impossible in the 2010s — each human review for compliance was necessary, but time-consuming. AI, Burke said, had no hype around it in 2015 when he had the idea to use it to help achieve the speed he was looking for. The one thing holding him back was that he didn't know enough about AI to build an engine that could do what he needed to do. Then he met Brandon Morton, an AI researcher at Drexel who was working on his doctorate at the time. 'We met at church randomly,' Burke said. 'It was like divine intervention … His research is really what powered our ability to actually do what we're doing.' Morton effectively became a cofounder of Lithero. Even with his leadership, Burke said, it was a challenge. 'AI is very, very difficult,' Burke said. 'People don't appreciate the beauty and the power of the human mind and how hard it is to get machines to simulate what we do.' An AI assistant that doesn't hallucinate The technology Lithero created is called LARA, Lithero Artificial Review Assistant. 'You could think of it sort of like an artificial lawyer,' Burke said. Once LARA has all of a client's necessary information, it essentially pre-screens the content. It's not meant to replace the client's human lawyer, just to make it so that the lawyer has less to do on each individual piece of marketing. Then, he said, LARA will understand the client-specific content well enough that the client can use the tool for other things as well, such as creating annotations and comparing content to customer behavioral data. While today people tend to think of large language model generative AI like ChatGPT when they think of AI, LARA still isn't generative — it doesn't generate content based on prompts, it is a screening and correlation tool that can be trained to know everything about a specific brand. As such, it is not susceptible to drawbacks like hallucinations, when an AI model randomly answers with false information presented as fact, often a result of insufficient data or bias. The public launch of generative AI did help the company, though, by making the concept of an AI tool less obscure. 'It has normalized what we're doing,' Burke said. 'We're in a very conservative, cautious, slow industry — it changed the conversations that I was having.' Now, he says, there is a lot of demand, and a lot of clients bringing them new ideas on how the company can continue to grow. 'Our future is not just compliance, it's also creative,' Burke said. 'We recently launched some creative assistants, and are seeing this amazing amount of excitement.' From one to ten To get to where Lithero is today, with a team of ten and a growing roster of clients, it spent years based at Ic@3401, a University City coworking and incubation space sponsored by Drexel University and the University City Science Center that closed in 2024. One of its earliest investors, apart from friends and family, was Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Burke also credits its law firm Morgan Lewis as a big supporter, as well as angel investment group Broad Street Angels.
Technical.ly
08-05-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
GoWell Benefits aims to take the stress out of employee health plans
Startup profile: GoWell Founded by: Holly Adams Year founded: 2021 Headquarters: Philadelphia, PA Sector: Insurance Funding and valuation: $2.83 million, according to PitchBook Key ecosystem partners: Ben Franklin Technology Partners, Naples Technology Ventures, Chloe Capital When Holly Adams worked as a benefits consultant helping businesses navigate health insurance enrollment, she knew there had to be a better way. For more than a decade, she watched as employers and employees struggled with complicated enrollment processes, long questionnaires and tech that wasn't as accessible as she knew it could be. 'I tried different things, even sending iPads to stores to see if they made it easier, but it just was a little bit too complicated for the average consumer,' Adams told She took what she'd learned and came up with GoWell Benefits, a platform launched in 2021 that simplifies the enrollment process for employers with an easy and accessible way to insure employees. 'We work with brokers and we work with employers, insurance carriers, and employees,' Adams said. 'All those entities touch our system to make insurance more transparent and a little bit easier to understand.' From early adoption to tech startup Adams started her career at the end of the 1990s, when tech was just starting to enter the workplace. Working for GlaxoSmithKline, she helped the company get its compliance data warehouse set up. Her job back then was to meet with developers to make sure that prescription data could be analyzed. While she would shift away from a technical job when she went into benefits consulting, that experience would come in handy when she decided to create GoWell. 'I had the opportunity to work with programmers and work towards realizing a dream,' Adams said, 'then I took that experience and used it to build my own dream.' The biggest hurdle, she said, is getting the enrollment process started. An employee who feels overwhelmed by enrolling before it even starts isn't going to be focused on what matters, like which deductibles meet their needs, which prescriptions are covered, co-pays and whether their chosen doctors are covered. 'Until you get that piece in, it's hard to try to make insurance more transparent, because people are trying to figure out how to do it, as opposed to what they should be focusing on, which is what they're getting,' she said. It's a holistic approach, she said, that meets employees where they are, engaging them and ultimately making it easier for the employer to track benefits. One of the 2% of VC-funded ventures Today, GoWell has about 10,000 users on its platform, a staff of 10 employees and has reached profitability. In the beginning, Adams used her own funds to support the startup, but funding eventually started coming in, including from its lead investors Ben Franklin Technology Partners and Naples Technology Ventures, as well as Chloe Capital, a VC firm that focuses on investing in women. 'They've been very supportive in helping us build out the technology and make it as a startup,' Adams said. 'We're really lucky because we're one of 2% of women [owned startups] that are funded.' So far GoWell has raised $2.85 million, according to Pitchbook. There are more funding rounds to come for GoWell, she said, with plans to use future investments to add more components to the platform, including AI. 'That's what we're developing now,' Adams said. 'Making our software more intuitive.'
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Local firms secure Ben Franklin funding
Two Lackawanna County firms received investments from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Ben Franklin approved $972,500 in funding from January to March to support product development, workforce expansion and operational growth across the region, officials said in a news release. Specifically, Ben Franklin invested $785,000 among eight early-stage companies, including I Need A Speaker — a global online platform that connects event planners with speakers of all experience levels. Ben Franklin also invested $187,500 among seven established manufacturers — including JED Pool Tools Inc. (operating as Northeastern Plastics), which specializes in custom injection molding, prototyping and 3D printing services — incorporating student enrichment work with a college or university partner, officials said. JED Pool Tools Inc. will partner with Lehigh University to conduct a strategic organizational assessment to support growth and development, per the release.
