QbDVision

A software company sitting inside the world's most paperwork-heavy industry

Somewhere right now, a scientist at a large drugmaker is searching for a single number. A flow rate. A specification. The reason a colleague, three reorganizations ago, set a parameter the way they did. The answer exists. It is buried in a PDF, inside a folder, inside a shared drive, attached to an email that left the company with the person who wrote it. QbDVision exists for that moment.

The company builds a cloud platform for something called Digital CMC - Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls, the body of knowledge that describes how a drug is actually made, tested, and kept consistent batch after batch. It is the least glamorous and most consequential paperwork in medicine. QbDVision's bet is simple to state and hard to do: turn that paperwork into structured, connected, searchable data, and the medicine on the other side moves faster.

Today the platform runs inside 7 of the top 25 biopharma organizations and CDMOs, including, by the company's account, three of the six largest pharma and biotech companies on earth. Not bad for a firm that started life named after a residential street in Austin.

Drug development runs on documents. That is the whole problem.

Here is the irony at the center of modern medicine: the industry that sequences genomes and engineers mRNA still manages its most critical know-how the way a law firm did in 1998 - in documents. Word files, spreadsheets, scanned reports. Each one a sealed container. Knowledge goes in; it rarely comes back out in a form anyone else can use.

The cost shows up everywhere. When a therapy moves from a lab to a manufacturing partner, teams re-key information by hand, a process called tech transfer that can take months and quietly introduces errors. When a regulator asks why a parameter was chosen, the answer lives in someone's memory. When a company wants to apply machine learning to its own process data, it discovers the data was never data at all - just text trapped in files.

QbDVision's founders looked at this and saw not a documentation problem but a knowledge problem wearing a documentation costume. The fix was not a better document. It was getting rid of the document as the unit of truth.

A pharma quality expert and his neighbor walk into a startup

The company began in 2015 as CherryCircle Software, named for Cherry Circle Street in Austin. Yash Sabharwal - an inventor and serial entrepreneur who had been overseeing process development at a pharma startup - had watched the document problem from the inside and grown tired of it. He had the domain. He needed someone who could build.

That someone, conveniently, lived next door. Ryan Shillington, a software veteran with decades of experience architecting systems at scale, became co-founder and CTO. The pairing is the company's quiet thesis in human form: deep pharmaceutical knowledge on one side, serious engineering on the other, and a shared conviction that, as the team likes to put it, "the process matters as much as the product."

They built around a principle the industry already believed in but struggled to operationalize: Quality by Design, or QbD. The idea is that quality should be engineered into a product from the earliest stage, not inspected in at the end. A fine principle. The trouble was that nobody had software that actually made it work day to day. QbDVision became that software - which is also where the name came from.

From document-first to document-free

What QbDVision sells is, at heart, a single trusted place for a drug's knowledge to live. Instead of a parameter being a sentence inside a report, it becomes a piece of structured data - atomized, the company says, and aligned with FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). Connect enough of those pieces and you get something the industry has rarely had: a live, queryable map of how a product and its process actually fit together.

What you can actually do with it

Teams use the platform to define products, processes, and analytical methods digitally; to manage risk and specifications; to run technology transfer without re-keying everything by hand; and to generate compliance documentation automatically rather than assembling it the night before a deadline. It runs as a validated SaaS environment built for regulated work, which matters when your customers answer to the FDA.

The pitch to a skeptical scientist is refreshingly concrete: spend less time hunting for and verifying data, and more time on the science. The pitch to the executive above them is that the same structured data is exactly what you need to make AI useful in pharma - because models are only as good as the data underneath, and most pharma data was never structured to begin with.

The numbers, and the names behind them

Claims are easy in enterprise software. QbDVision's are at least specific. Customers report tech transfer times cut by as much as 80% and CDMO onboarding running 75% faster. The company cites a return on investment of roughly 2.5 to 5 times for enterprise deployments, and a customer retention rate near 95% - the kind of number that, in B2B software, usually means people are getting real work done rather than shelf-ware.

The customer list does some talking too. Bayer. Sanofi, through its Translate Bio and mRNA Center of Excellence work. AskBio, Viralgen, Cue Biopharma, Glycomine, and BLES Pharma. Adoption inside several of the largest drugmakers on the planet is the strongest signal a company in this category can send, because big pharma does not adopt unproven software for the work that touches a regulator.

"Deliver every cure"

Two words sit at the bottom of the company's pitch: deliver every cure. It is a big claim for a company that makes data infrastructure, and that is rather the point. QbDVision's argument is that the bottleneck between a scientific breakthrough and a patient is increasingly not the science. It is the slow, manual, error-prone work of getting that science made, documented, and approved at scale. Fix the knowledge layer, the thinking goes, and you shorten the distance between a discovery and the person waiting for it.

The team backing that claim is a mix of pharma lifers and software builders - leadership has described it as veterans carrying more than a hundred years of collective experience across process development, quality, and regulatory compliance, working from offices in Austin, Boston, and Dublin. The 2025 funding round, co-led by returning investors Northpond Ventures and S3 Ventures with Create Health Ventures, was less a rescue than a bet on scaling something that already works.

The AI story is really a data story

Every pharma company now wants AI in its operations. Most will discover the same uncomfortable truth: their data is locked in documents and was never built to be read by a machine. QbDVision spent a decade structuring exactly that data for entirely human reasons - faster transfers, cleaner submissions, less hunting. The accidental payoff is that structured CMC knowledge is precisely the raw material AI needs. The company that made pharma's paperwork searchable is well placed to make it intelligent.

Skeptics have fair questions. The category is young, the incumbents in PLM and lab informatics are large, and "single source of truth" is a promise the software industry has broken before. But QbDVision has the one thing that is hard to fake in regulated industries: customers who do the most demanding work running the platform for it.

Return, for a moment, to that scientist searching for a single number. In the world QbDVision is building, the number is not buried in a PDF. It is a connected piece of data, with its history attached, found in seconds rather than days - and the colleague who set it, three reorganizations ago, left their reasoning behind in a form the machine can read. The paperwork is gone. The knowledge stayed. That is the whole company, in one search bar.

Five things that don't fit in a pitch deck

• The company's original name, CherryCircle Software, came from an actual street in Austin, Texas.
• The two co-founders were neighbors before they were colleagues - the build half lived next door to the domain half.
• Its mission for one of the most document-saturated industries on earth is to go "document-free."
• The entire pitch fits in two words: deliver every cure.
• Headquarters in Austin, with outposts in Boston and Dublin - a Texas startup with an EU passport.