He watched nurses retype cancer-trial data by hand. Then he built a machine to make sure they never had to again.
Somewhere right now, a research coordinator is squinting at one computer screen and typing the same numbers into a second one. The numbers are cancer-trial data. Every hour spent copying them across is an hour not spent with a patient. Zach Taft saw this happen for years, and decided it was unacceptable.
Taft is the CEO of IgniteData, a company most people have never heard of solving a problem almost everyone in medicine has quietly learned to live with. Its flagship product, Archer, does one deceptively simple thing: it moves clinical trial data straight from a hospital's electronic health record into the pharmaceutical sponsor's data-capture system, automatically, with a full audit trail. No retyping. No 30-day wait. No mountain of correction queries.
The result reads like a rounding error against decades of habit. Data that used to take the industry an average of 30 days to reach a sponsor now arrives in under three. Correction queries drop by as much as 87 percent. And the coordinator, freed from transcription, goes back to the work that actually requires a human being.
Taft did not invent IgniteData. That credit belongs to Dan Hydes and Richard Yeatman, who met in 2013 inside an NHS Foundation Trust and spotted the same data-transfer absurdity from the hospital floor. What Taft brought, when the founders recruited him in 2024, was a track record of taking healthcare technology and making it enormous.
He helped drive the roughly $1.1 billion acquisition of M*Modal by 3M. He ran digital innovation and ventures at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the most respected cancer centers in the world. He co-founded a research consortium there. By his own count, he has scaled three digital health companies to successful exits. IgniteData is his fourth act, and possibly his most consequential.
"When I was at MSK," he says, "I had a birds-eye view of the burdensome time and expense involved in the manual extraction of data from clinical trial sites, followed by the re-transcription of that data to the systems of pharmaceutical companies that serve as trial sponsors." Most people would sigh at that sentence and move on. Taft left to build the fix.
“ We anticipate more growth and innovation in clinical trials and drug development over the next five years than in the past five decades. — Zach Taft
There is a fashionable version of healthcare innovation, all AI drug discovery and glossy molecules and press releases. Taft went the other direction. He picked the least photogenic bottleneck in the entire enterprise of medicine, the movement of a number from point A to point B, and turned it into a company growing at triple digits.
The logic is disarmingly clear. A lot of what makes clinical trials slow has nothing to do with the difficulty of the science. It is friction: fragmented systems that do not talk to each other, manual entry that invites error, and correction cycles that swallow weeks. Remove the friction and everything downstream moves faster, including the day a treatment reaches a patient.
"Historically, this ecosystem has been fragmented, which has hindered progress, innovation, and global scale," Taft says. "However, we now see these key stakeholders come together with a unified goal." Sponsors, sites, technology firms, and regulators, in his telling, are finally rowing in the same direction. Archer is built to ride that current.
Taft points to AI and machine learning as the accelerant. "AI and machine learning enable more efficient data harmonization and enhance interoperability between EHR and EDC systems," he says, noting that these technologies "can reduce queries by over 90 percent." His stated next frontier is thornier and more ambitious: "integrating unstructured data for regulatory-grade submissions." Turning messy clinical notes into audit-ready data is the kind of problem that keeps this industry busy for a decade.
Investors noticed. IgniteData's 2025 Series A closed oversubscribed at $11 million, led by FCA Venture Partners with the Labcorp Venture Fund and Epsilon joining as strategic backers. "This round is about scale," Taft said at the close. The money is aimed at expanding the global research-site network and pushing Archer's generative-AI data automation further.
A primary challenge is the wide variation in data collection methods within the same organization.
Automating this process can significantly enhance the accuracy, efficiency, and effectiveness of clinical research coordinators.
The next frontier will certainly be integrating unstructured data for regulatory-grade submissions.
The ultimate beneficiaries of these efforts will be the patients having greater access, global, to life-saving treatments.
Investment in EHR to EDC technology is coming from a diverse array of sectors, including private equity, venture capital, hospital systems, and big tech.
If 2025 was about execution at scale, 2026 will be about acceleration.
IgniteData did a rare thing. Its founders built the product, proved the idea, and then went looking for someone else to scale it. They found Taft.
It is a quiet act of humility that most startups never manage. Dan Hydes and Richard Yeatman had the origin story and the technical vision. What they wanted was a leader who had already turned healthcare technology into something the size of a Labcorp partnership. Taft is careful to keep the credit where it belongs, naming the founders and their 2013 hospital-floor insight whenever he tells the story. In an industry full of solo-genius mythology, that generosity is worth noticing.
By his own count, Taft has scaled three digital health companies to successful exits. IgniteData is the fourth in progress.
The flagship product is named Archer - a fitting name for a tool built to hit its target on the first try.
IgniteData is headquartered in Earley, England, near Reading. Taft runs it from New York.
The company shrank the wait for trial data from a 30-day industry average to under three days.
Archer has engaged 81% of NCI-designated clinical research sites and eight of the top ten U.S. cancer centers.
“ The ultimate beneficiaries of these efforts will be the patients having greater access, global, to life-saving treatments. — Zach Taft, CEO of IgniteData
Zach Taft is the CEO of IgniteData, a healthcare technology company whose Archer platform automates the transfer of clinical trial data straight from hospital electronic health records into pharma data-capture systems. Brought in by the founders in 2024, he has scaled the company from a handful of trial sites to a network spanning four continents and eight of the top ten U.S. cancer centers. Before IgniteData he helped drive the $1.1B acquisition of M*Modal by 3M, served as a 3M product leader, and ran digital innovation and ventures at Memorial Sloan Kettering, where he co-founded the Clinical Research Innovation Consortium. His obsession: cutting the weeks of manual data re-typing out of clinical trials so treatments reach patients faster.
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