The Story of Intelligencia AI: Sleeping on Sofas to Solving Pharma’s $85 Billion Failure Problem
There’s a specific kind of insanity that comes with starting a company: leaving a stable consulting job, draining your savings, and convincing talented people to sleep on your sofa while you build something the world isn’t ready for yet.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Dimitrios Skaltsas, CEO and Co-Founder of Intelligencia AI, shared the story of how his team went from that shoebox apartment in New York to building the first AI platform for assessing drug development risk—a market where 85-90% of clinical trials fail and billions of dollars vanish into programs that will never reach patients.
The McKinsey Moment That Changed Everything
The origin story begins inside McKinsey, where Dimitrios was working on “new ventures” in 2015-2016, the early days of AI.
“McKinsey was experimenting with big data and AI, and they had what they call new ventures. And at some point, I did not want to do consulting anymore. And I was offered the opportunity to move into ventures and actually build the vertical for pharmaceutical RD, both track discovery and track development,” Dimitrios recalls.
He was building a team of data scientists and software engineers, having conversations with pharma about what could be done better with AI. One of those ideas became Intelligencia AI’s core. But McKinsey “didn’t have institutional patients or risk appetite work on this.”
Summer to fall 2017, Dimitrios left McKinsey and with his co-founder started licensing the AI technology.
Falling in Love and Living Scrappy
Ask Dimitrios about those first six months and he reaches for a metaphor every founder understands: falling in love.
“Sometimes I make the metaphor of it’s like being in love, like falling in love where everything is rosy and you’re very optimistic, and somehow you have a big disregard for risk, which helps a lot,” he says.
How scrappy? “Our sheriff, data science, who was the first person to join the company beyond me, and my Co-Founder. She literally used to sleep on my sofa in a shoebox apartment in New York.”
The team was bootstrapping everything. No income. Dimitrios was “digging into my savings.” The possibility made it worth it: “Everything is possible and, you know, let’s create something, let’s append the world.”
The Problem Worth Solving
To understand why Intelligencia AI matters, you have to understand the elephant in pharma’s room.
Drug development takes about ten years on average and costs hundreds of millions. The shocking part? “Most therapists don’t make the mark. The clinical trials fail, like 85 90% of the drugs of the programs fail,” Dimitrios explains.
The industry’s approach to managing this massive risk is outdated. They look at benchmarks, call experts, collate opinions. “You have this paradox where science is trade season making. Science is suboptimal, it’s not evolved enough,” Dimitrios says.
Intelligencia AI became the first company to apply AI and machine learning to better assess probability of success for new therapies. “If you can understand it better, then you can actually mitigate it better. And that means you can bring therapies faster to market, you can make better decisions.”
The COVID Watershed and the ChatGPT Challenge
While everyone thinks ChatGPT was the watershed moment for AI, Dimitrios has a different perspective.
“The water said moment in our space in pharma was Covid. When it comes to, you know, pending the part time of how people do drug development and drug discovery, it’s a space where on average it takes about ten years for a drug that is in clinical trials eventually to make it to the patients, make it to market. And during COVID it was shown that whoa, can be done much faster.”
COVID proved pharmaceutical development could accelerate. That’s when investment in AI took off.
But ChatGPT created noise. “It turbocharged all these, it kind of accelerated something that already started being in motion during COVID And self dept is not necessarily always a positive impact, right?” Dimitrios explains. Some pharma companies started “shutting down or shutting out subject from their organizations because they’re like, okay, we cannot trust it yet.”
For Intelligencia AI, the challenge became cutting through noise by going deeper and prioritizing explainability.
Evolution and Reinvention
What Dimitrios appreciates most about the founder journey is constant evolution. “You have to reinvent yourself, which means it never gets boring.”
“Back to the metaphor of falling in love. At some point it feels like, okay, now, you delivered the baby, and suddenly you have responsibilities, and you know that the baby stays up at night and poops and gets sick, and you have to take care of it.”
The company reached cash flow positive while maintaining high growth. “Right now, to some extent, R and D is funded by our customers,” Dimitrios says, noting they’ve built patented technology that’s “pretty unique for an AI company in our space.”
The Vision: Becoming the Gold Standard
Looking ahead three to five years, Dimitrios’s vision focuses on impact over metrics.
“My vision is track development, landscape gets more effective, more productive. It has been on historical low when it comes to IRR on R and D, it’s historical low. It’s not sustainable. So I do hope that with our technology, we can help bring better therapies, patients faster, help increase the productivity in the space.”
For the company: “The way I see, benefit a lot by being recognized as the gold starter in our space. Again, we have been pioneering in space. We having the first mover is not easy in many ways. It comes with strong challenges. But I think increasingly gets recognized as, you know, the compass out there.”
He envisions full therapeutic area coverage beyond oncology, geographic expansion into Asia, and a team of about 100 people. But the real measure goes deeper: “Most of us have gone through either directly oriented, some healthcare related event in our lives, I have, and many people. But we are fighting, if you will, for better outcomes for patients out there.”
From sleeping on sofas to potentially saving lives—that’s a story worth the butterflies.
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