Accelerating Life-Saving Medicine: Our Investment in Apprentice

March 20, 2023

ICONIQ Growth announces its partnership with Apprentice, a next-generation, cloud-based, all-in-one manufacturing solution for life sciences enabling streamlined, collaborative, and flexible manufacturing, by leading the company's latest $65 million round.

Written by: Caroline Xie, Murali Joshi, and Xiaowan Chu

Apprentice Founder & CEO & Co-founder, Angelo Stracquatanio III

The pharmaceutical industry has made incredible strides in recent years to develop developing life-changing therapeutics for many diseases, offering new hope to patients and their families. But while innovative therapeutics in biologics and cell and gene therapies have tremendous potential, they’re also meaningfully more complex and costly to manufacture compared to traditional small molecule drugs. These challenges are magnified by a manufacturing process that has traditionally relied on manual, paper-based processes or legacy systems, making it extremely difficult for companies to adapt their on-premises systems to meet the requirements to produce these new drugs. Apprentice aims to change all that, and that’s why we’re excited to be leading their $65M funding round alongside our friends at Alkeon Capital and Insight Partners.

When we first met Angelo Stracquatanio, Apprentice’s CEO, and co-founder, we were immediately captivated by his enthusiasm and passion to tackle this growing problem in modern pharma manufacturing. Angelo founded the company in 2014, inspired by his wife who experienced the difficulties of navigating the archaic processes firsthand while working in pharmaceutical manufacturing. From that experience, Apprentice was born—a next-generation, cloud-based, all-in-one solution for life sciences manufacturing that enables streamlined, collaborative, and flexible processes.

We believe Apprentice's Tempo Manufacturing Cloud platform is a powerful solution transforming the operations of pharma companies of all types—from global manufacturers like Bristol Myers Squibb to innovative biotechs like Synthego—helping them "get from drug discovery to patient delivery faster." Apprentice’s technology provides a comprehensive suite of capabilities such as augmented workflow execution, resource management, and virtual collaboration to improve operations at the manufacturing site level. Tempo allows manufacturers to coordinate the materials, equipment, recipes, and personnel needed to plan, execute, test, and release a batch from one shared system. It can also connect all sites involved in production together to view, manage, and accelerate the end-to-end drug lifecycle. 

Apprentice has emerged at a critical moment in the evolution of the pharma manufacturing technology market. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for manufacturers to update their technology to remain agile and productive amid supply chain disruptions and increasingly decentralized and distributed teams. In addition to helping customers maintain on-time delivery of life-saving therapeutics through challenging times, Apprentice also adds immense value by enabling fast and cost-efficient new site deployments with meaningfully lower capex compared to legacy systems, while promoting accuracy, speed, and compliance throughout the manufacturing process. 

ICONIQ Growth is thrilled to partner with Angelo and the entire Apprentice team to support their mission of bringing all stages of drug production into one platform to turn molecules into medicine. Apprentice represents a powerful addition to our family of best-in-class healthcare IT companies including Benchling, Devoted Health, GoodRx, Komodo Health, Nayya, Notable Health, QGenda, Reify Health, Twin Health and Unite Us. If you’re building a ground-breaking company in the healthcare space, we’d love to hear from you.

The views expressed in this presentation are those of ICONIQ Growth ("ICONIQ" or the "firm"), are the result of proprietary research, may be subjective, and may not be relied upon in making an investment decision. This presentation is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities which will only be made pursuant to definitive offering documents and subscription agreements, including, without limitation, any investment fund or investment product referenced herein. Any reproduction or distribution of this presentation in whole or in part, or the disclosure of any of its contents, without the prior consent of ICONIQ, is prohibited. This presentation may contain forward-looking statements based on current plans, estimates and projections. The recipient of this presentation ("you") are cautioned that a number of important factors could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, the forward-looking statements. The numbers, figures and case studies included in this presentation have been included for purposes of illustration only, and no assurance can be given that the actual results of ICONIQ or any of its partners and affiliates will correspond with the results contemplated in the presentation. No information is contained herein with respect to conflicts of interest, which may be significant. The portfolio companies and other parties mentioned herein may reflect a selective list of the prior investments made by ICONIQ. The views expressed in this presentation are those of ICONIQ Growth ("ICONIQ" or the "firm"), are the result of proprietary research, may be subjective, and may not be relied upon in making an investment decision. This presentation is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities which will only be made pursuant to definitive offering documents and subscription agreements, including, without limitation, any investment fund or investment product referenced herein. Any reproduction or distribution of this presentation in whole or in part, or the disclosure of any of its contents, without the prior consent of ICONIQ, is prohibited. This presentation may contain forward-looking statements based on current plans, estimates and projections. The recipient of this presentation ("you") are cautioned that a number of important factors could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, the forward-looking statements. The numbers, figures and case studies included in this presentation have been included for purposes of illustration only, and no assurance can be given that the actual results of ICONIQ or any of its partners and affiliates will correspond with the results contemplated in the presentation. No information is contained herein with respect to conflicts of interest, which may be significant. The portfolio companies and other parties mentioned herein may reflect a selective list of the prior investments made by ICONIQ. Certain of the economic and market information contained herein may have been obtained from published sources and/or prepared by other parties. While such sources are believed to be reliable, none of ICONIQ or any of its affiliates and partners, employees and representatives assume any responsibility for the accuracy of such information. All of the information in the presentation is presented as of the date made available to you (except as otherwise specified), and is subject to change without notice, and may not be current or may have changed (possibly materially) between the date made available to you and the date actually received or reviewed by you. ICONIQ assumes no obligation to update or otherwise revise any information, projections, forecasts or estimates contained in the presentation, including any revisions to reflect changes in economic or market conditions or other circumstances arising after the date the items were made available to you or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. For avoidance of doubt, ICONIQ is not acting as an adviser or fiduciary in any respect in connection with providing this presentation and no relationship shall arise between you and ICONIQ as a result of this presentation being made available to you. ICONIQ is a diversified financial services firm and has direct client relationships with persons that may become limited partners of ICONIQ funds. Notwithstanding that a person may be referred to herein as a "client" of the firm, no limited partner of any fund will, in its capacity as such, be a client of ICONIQ. There can be no assurance that the investments made by any ICONIQ fund will be profitable or will equal the performance of prior investments made by persons described in this presentation.