Eric Lefkofksy and Tempus Reach Unicorn Status in the Investment World
Eric Lefkofsky is moving beyond Groupon. His latest venture, Tempus Labs, is a data-analytics startup in the medical technology field. It’s quickly becoming a leader in precision medicine. In fact, over the course of the two years since its founding, the company has raised nearly $210 million. Recently it raised another $80 million and has doubled its employee count, employing nearly 400 people in the last 18 months.
The company has become a unicorn with funding by companies like the Kinship Trust, a venture capitalist firm led by T. Row Price. It also has investors like Revolution Ventures, a venture capitalist firm led by AOL founder, Steve Case.
Eric Lefkofsky started the company after seeing the disparity between the technology available for commercial use and the technology being used by the medical industry. After watching a family member go through treatment without such technology, he realized he needed to do something.
Tempus was created in 2016 with the promise of delivering precision oncology through clinical and molecular data. They gather data from the individual through genome sequencing and they also analyze electronic health records and clinical trials to provide the best treatment options available to each individual. The company’s strength lies in its ability to analyze data and provide feedback to oncologists in real time. By interpreting the clinical data and the molecular data, the oncologist can spend less time sifting through information and spend more time helping their patients.
It has the potential to be largely beneficial for cancer patients as well. Not only will the physician have access to the largest library of clinical and molecular data in the world, but they will be able to analyze which treatments have worked the best for people with similar molecular and genomic backgrounds. They are creating a system that can collect the clinical data and interpret it.
The company uses the strengths of a variety of leaders such as mathematicians, data-analytics, software engineers, biologists and oncologists to provide information in real time to the physicians. The goal is to provide the best option available to these people who have had a dramatic shift in their life when they were diagnosed. They also seek to create the largest library of clinical and molecular data and pair it with a system that will make the large amounts of data useful to the doctor in real time, so they can spend the majority of their time helping patients instead of sifting through difficult to read electronic health records.
Tempus has gained a variety of prestigious partnerships with more than half of the academic medical centers and a variety of leading oncologists. The demand has quickly forced the company to grow as it has already outgrown its current lab. They continue to scale the team to the needs of the work and they are doubling their lab space.
Eric Lefkofsky reveals that the company has gained a lot of attention from the Chicago technology community. Lefkofsky has been the co-founder of other companies like Groupon, Echo Global Logistics, and InnerWorkings. He is also a dedicated philanthropist. He started the Lefkofsky Foundation with his wife and is a member of the Giving Pledge.
