Data firm Aridhia on track for profit after Dutch deal

Informatics specialist Aridhia is set to turn an annual profit for the first time in nine years of trading after signing the latest in a string of collaboration deals across Europe.

Aridhia chief executive Chris Roche. Picture: Contributed

The company, which employs 40 people in Edinburgh and Glasgow, will help deliver a digital research platform to one of the Netherlands’ most prestigious university medical facilities, the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre. The six-figure agreement is to provide data management and biomedical analytics for up to 1,600 clinical research projects during the next three years.

The consortium includes Aridhia, ICT services provider Vancis and MGRID, a specialist in clinical datasets. Mathias Prokop, head of radiology and nuclear medicine at Radboud, said the project will help researchers more rapidly extract value from multiple types of data, while also improving collaboration and security.

“The digital research environment is an essential step in research of the future: better structure, documentation, reuse of data and collaboration lead to acceleration of research and increase output and quality,” he added.

The network will be based around the AnalytiXagility platform developed four years ago by Aridhia with financial support from Innovate UK. The win adds to the firm’s growing number of European projects, with AnalytiXagility now in use in about 40 prominent research collaborations across the Continent.

Aridhia chief executive Chris Roche said the firm will hire a number of new people following the success of these projects, which include the ground-breaking European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia programme.

“We are delighted to bring our AnalytiXagility platform into this venture,” added Roche, who took over the helm in April 2015. “Radboud really understands the need for academic medical centres to adopt breakthrough technologies in order to accelerate the discovery of insights and increase institutional competitiveness.”

Roche has led Aridhia’s transition to a cloud-based delivery model of “research as a service” (RaaS). This has proven a major selling point as it doesn’t lock subscribers into potentially costly long-term contracts.

“We’re tremendously proud to have helped fund Aridhia’s original development of their AnalytiXagility platform four years ago,” said Ruth McKernan, chief executive of Innovate UK.

The privately-owned firm does not disclose its revenue figures, but a spokeswoman confirmed that it is on track for profitability in the current year.

Aridhia was set up by entrepreneur David Sibbald, who co-founded Atlantech Technologies before selling the business to US networking giant Cisco for £114 million in May 2000. Sibbald was chief executive of Aridhia until Roche’s promotion from chief commercial officer, and now serves as the company’s executive chairman.