The patient finally owns the record

In June 2026, a 30-person company in New York closed an $18 million round and told the pharmaceutical industry something it was not used to hearing: if you want the data, ask the patient.

That is the whole of Novellia, more or less. On one side sits a free app that lets an ordinary person pull two decades of medical history out of 50,000-plus U.S. health systems and into a single phone screen in about half a minute. On the other sits a real-world data business that sells what that history reveals - de-identified, structured, and, crucially, shared on purpose - to the companies trying to build the next generation of drugs. Most data brokers buy your records from a hospital or an insurer and never tell you. Novellia's pitch is the opposite. Nothing moves unless you say so.

It is a tidy idea, which is usually a warning sign. Healthcare is a graveyard of tidy ideas. So the useful question is not whether Novellia sounds nice - it does - but whether anyone is actually paying for it. As of this writing, several of the world's ten largest pharmaceutical companies are, on multi-year contracts worth seven figures each. That tends to settle the argument.

A $50 billion industry built on guesswork

Here is the awkward secret of modern drug development. The data that researchers rely on to understand how diseases behave and how treatments perform is mostly assembled from insurance claims and hospital billing records. It is the data equivalent of reconstructing a novel from its receipts. You can see that the patient bought the medication. You cannot see whether it worked, how they felt, or what the doctor wrote in the margin.

Novellia puts the annual cost of this fragmented real-world data ecosystem at more than $50 billion. The number is large and the information is still incomplete, which is a uniquely modern kind of failure - to spend that much and learn that little.

The gap, in other words, was never really about technology. It was about consent. The person who holds the most complete version of any medical story - the patient - had been left out of the transaction entirely. Novellia's bet is that you can close the data gap and the trust gap with the same move.

It started with a four-month race

When CEO Shashi Shankar's grandfather was diagnosed with gastroesophageal cancer, the family did what families do: they tried to gather the records, line up the specialists, and understand what they were facing. The records were scattered across systems that did not talk to each other. Four months later, he was gone. Shankar started Novellia on the anniversary of that loss.

He did not start it alone. Shankar and co-founder Dr. Abe Abraham, the company's chief medical officer, are both Genentech alumni - one steeped in digital health, the other in how drugs actually get developed. Co-founder and CTO Elliot Katz built the engine. The original framing was almost academic; they called it "digitomics," a digital companion to the multiomics platforms decoding human biology. The name has mercifully softened. The thesis has not.

The bet is structurally clever, which is the part investors like. Give patients something genuinely valuable for free - a complete, organized view of their own health - and a portion of them will, in gratitude and self-interest, agree to share that data for research. The consumer product is not a loss leader. It is the supply chain.

Two apps, one idea

What Novellia actually ships comes in two halves that feed each other.

The technology under the hood is unglamorous and essential. Anyone can store a PDF of a lab report. Turning thousands of inconsistent, hand-written-in-spirit clinical narratives into something a researcher can query is the hard part, and it is where the NLP earns its keep.

The numbers that matter

Vision is cheap; traction is not. Novellia's case rests on a handful of figures - the willingness of patients to share, the money already on the table, and the cost of the problem it is attacking.

Consent as a business model

Plenty of companies talk about putting patients first. Novellia structured its economics so that it has to. The patients are not the product to be sold; they are the partners who decide whether a sale happens at all. Its stated values - integrity, grit, optimism, excellence, urgency - read like every other startup's poster until you remember the urgency here is literal. Records that arrive too late are a problem the founders have lived.

There is an irony worth naming. For years the industry insisted that better patient data was technically impossible, too messy, too siloed, too regulated. It turns out the missing ingredient was simply asking permission. Permission scales surprisingly well.

The record, returned

The skeptic's case is real. Two-sided health data markets are hard. Patient enthusiasm in a survey is not the same as patient action in an app. And selling data to pharma, however consented, will always invite scrutiny - as it should. Novellia's answer is to make consent the load-bearing wall rather than the marketing copy, and then let the contracts speak.

So return to where this began. A family in a hospital, a diagnosis, records scattered across systems that refuse to cooperate, and a clock running down. That scene plays out somewhere every day. The promise of Novellia is narrow and concrete: the next family opens an app, watches twenty years of history assemble itself in half a minute, and walks into the room knowing what they are facing. The data was always theirs. Novellia is just the company that finally handed it back.