Moving clinical trial data straight from the hospital record to the sponsor’s database — without anyone re-typing it.
FOUNDED 2013 · ~51 EMPLOYEES · PRODUCT: ARCHER
IgniteData’s Archer platform bridges electronic health records and electronic data capture systems used in clinical trials. Photograph · IgniteData
Every clinical trial in the world runs on data - blood pressure, lab values, medications - and much of it is still copied by hand. A nurse or coordinator reads a number from a hospital’s electronic health record (EHR) and re-types it into a separate trial database, the electronic data capture (EDC) system, that a pharmaceutical sponsor uses. The process is slow, error-prone, and repeated across thousands of patient visits.
IgniteData was founded in 2013 in Berkshire, England, by Dan Hydes and Richard Yeatman to close that gap. In 2019 the founders judged the technology landscape ready and secured a UK Government grant to build a prototype: Archer, described by the company as the first truly system-agnostic EHR-to-EDC platform.
Archer is a cloud-based “Virtual Research Assistant” that moves clinically validated data directly from the hospital’s EHR into the sponsor’s EDC or another research system. It leans on the healthcare data standard HL7 FHIR and SMART on FHIR APIs - the same interoperability plumbing mandated by the US 21st Century Cures Act - to make systems that were never designed to talk to each other exchange data securely.
The result is a narrow but valuable job done well: less manual transcription, fewer transcription errors, and less time spent on source data verification (SDV) and query resolution. The clinician stays in control of what transfers, and an audit trail follows the data.
Today the company operates on both sides of the Atlantic - a UK base in Maidenhead and a US office in Wilmington, Delaware - and works with pharmaceutical sponsors and research hospitals running live trials.
This round is about scale. The demand for smarter, faster clinical trials is exploding.
Archer sits between two systems and moves validated data across the gap, using open healthcare standards rather than custom one-off integrations.
Built to connect leading EHRs and EDCs rather than a single vendor pairing, so it scales across multiple studies and sites.
Normalizes and maps complex clinical data with an audit trail, aiming for regulatory-grade accuracy without heavy manual effort.
The clinician retains control of transfers, and data security is designed to industry compliance standards.
IgniteData’s customers sit on two sides of the clinical trial relationship. Pharmaceutical and biopharma sponsors want cleaner data, faster, from the sites running their studies. Research hospitals and sites want to reduce the administrative burden on already-stretched staff.
Named deployments and partners include AstraZeneca, University College London Hospitals (UCLH), Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. At UCLH, Archer automates data from Epic EHR systems in an AstraZeneca-sponsored study.
The problems it targets are concrete: manual transcription, transcription error, slow source data verification, and the query cycles that follow when numbers don’t match between systems.
Archer [proved] to be intuitive and easy to use. We were up and running after a short but comprehensive training session.
Rather than building a bespoke integration for each EHR/EDC pairing, IgniteData bets on open standards (HL7 FHIR, SMART on FHIR) to work across systems. Its default competitor isn’t another vendor - it’s manual data entry and in-house point integrations. Broader eClinical and interoperability players include Medidata, Veeva, Clinical Ink and Datavant.
IgniteData licenses Archer to sponsors and research sites, typically deployed per study and per site, generating recurring subscription and deployment revenue. Partnerships with eClinical vendors (Advarra) and consultancies (ZS) extend its distribution into more trials and sites.
Dan Hydes and Richard Yeatman establish the company in Berkshire, UK, to tackle clinical trial data challenges.
The founders secure a UK Government grant to build Archer, aiming for the first truly agnostic EHR-to-EDC system.
Additional government grants bring total funding past £1 million to develop the platform.
A live mirror study transfers 100% of mapped Vital Signs and Labs data from UCLH’s EHR to a study database.
Archer launches at Cambridge University Hospitals and Memorial Sloan Kettering; IgniteData raises a Series A led by FCA Venture Partners.
They’re not just leading — they’re winning, and they’re transforming how sites and sponsors work together.
To scale, the co-founders moved into President and COO roles and brought in an external CEO.
Brought in as Chief Executive Officer to accelerate growth with sites and pharma partners.
Company co-founder, previously CEO, now President.
Company co-founder, transitioned from CTO to Chief Operating Officer.
It automates the secure transfer of clinical trial data between hospital electronic health records (EHRs) and sponsors’ electronic data capture (EDC) systems via its Archer platform, removing manual data entry.
Archer is IgniteData’s cloud-based, system-agnostic “Virtual Research Assistant” that uses HL7 FHIR and SMART on FHIR APIs to move clinically validated data from an EHR into an EDC or other research system, with the clinician retaining control.
Pharmaceutical sponsors and research hospitals, including AstraZeneca, University College London Hospitals, Cambridge University Hospitals, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
It was co-founded by Dan Hydes and Richard Yeatman. Zach Taft is now CEO, with Hydes as President and Yeatman as COO.
It has raised over £1 million in UK Government grants, strategic investment from ZS, and a Series A round led by FCA Venture Partners (August 2025) with SpringTide and Oncology Ventures.