The TraceLink team is ecstatic to share the news that the TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud won the Grand Prize at the Amazon.com 6th AWS Global Start-Up Challenge. TraceLink’s cloud-based application platform, developed to protect patients, enable health, grow profits and ensure compliance in global Life Sciences, was selected as best business application from over 2,500 global entries. Amazon highlighted TraceLink’s innovative use of AWS technology in combating drug counterfeiting, eliminating drug shortages and tackling other key business and social challenges facing global pharmaceutical companies and their patients.

“Globalization of pharmaceutical supply and patient demand is driving a transformation in the pharmaceutical industry as executives seek a global approach for protecting patient safety, ensuring access to high quality medicines and meeting pharmaceutical track and trace regulations,” said Shabbir Dahod, President and CEO, TraceLink Inc. “We demonstrated in the Start-Up Challenge that a cloud-based, globally integrated network is the only foundation which gives pharmaceutical supply chain participants the real-time visibility, end-to-end connectivity and pharmaceutical traceability required to ensure safe, quality medicines reach the hands of every patient that needs them. We are honored that Amazon recognized our innovation in building a secure, globally available application platform that connects every network participant, from ingredient producer to patient, through a single point-and-click connection in the cloud”

Launched in 2010, TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud has rapidly become the place where pharmaceutical companies, CMO/CPO supply partners, wholesale distributors and pharmacies connect, share data and collaborate to:

• Ensure global compliance with pharmaceutical serialization, ePedigree and reporting requirements for California ePedigree, EU Falsified Medicines Directive, China eCoding and other track and trace mandates
• Protect medicines from drug counterfeiting incidents like Avastin that kill over 100,000 people a year globally
• Eliminate drug shortages that have grown over 500 percent in recent years
• Cost-effectively access the $165 billion in new revenue growth available in Pharmerging markets
• Improve free cash flow and minimize operational cost by capturing supply chain efficiencies
• Build direct-to-patient communication through Apple iPhone and Google Android mobile devices

“The Amazon AWS cloud computing platform gives us the scale, performance and security we need to manage the billions of pharmaceutical products produced and the hundreds of billions in revenue generated by our Life Science customers each year,” added Mr. Dahod. “Only by fundamentally embracing and designing for the cloud could we take advantage of AWS’s global elasticity, data security and on-demand resources to manage this complexity. With our point-and-click network, we can connect and serve both the largest pharmaceutical company running SAP ERP and the smallest independent pharmacy running Quicken Quickbooks, all on the same network platform.”

The TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud delivers end-to-end visibility, traceability and collaboration by providing:

• Track and trace, supply chain collaboration and supplier quality management application suites
• Integrate-once, interoperate-with-everyone transaction translation
• A business relationship graph delivering true point-and-click connectivity across a global community
• A business collaboration platform simplifying cross-functional, cross-company team collaboration

With TraceLink, companies of all sizes and network complexities can optimally plan, execute, monitor and analyze all supply, production and distribution activities, for every product, with every partner in their network, at 1/20th of the cost and time of traditional enterprise applications and point-to-point integration approaches. Hear more in this video.

“The data security and reliability benefits for our customers by using a globally distributed AWS cloud platform cannot be overstated,” noted Peter Spellman, SVP Product and Cloud Engineering, TraceLink Inc. “Traditional enterprise data storage approaches cannot cost-effectively match the 99.999999999% durability that is available via cloud storage designed for mission-critical Life Science operations. Pharmaceutical serialization and global track and trace activities alone will generate terabytes of product and transactional data for a pharma company that must be securely stored across record retention periods and accessed across the global supply network. This was a key design criterion for the Life Sciences Cloud, to manage the high performance Big Data requirements of the global industry while providing scalable storage for any one company that is more secure and lower cost than is possible with on-premise solutions.”

TraceLink demonstrated the benefits of a globally integrated pharmaceutical supply network in the cloud to judges, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and media at the AWS Global Start-Up Challenge final event. A combined audience of over 400 saw the vision of the new supply chain where manufacturing leaders see precise status of all batches with every supply partner, how supply chain leaders create a complete chain of custody from ingredient to patient and where patients themselves verify the identity of any pharmaceutical, anywhere in the world, with the TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud.

About TraceLink

TraceLink protects patients, enables health, grows profits and ensures compliance for companies across the global Life Sciences network through the TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud. The TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud is a cloud-based application platform that enables complete global connectivity, visibility and traceability of pharmaceuticals from raw materials to patient. A single point and click connection to the Life Sciences Cloud delivers the information, insight and collaboration needed to improve performance and reduce risk across global supply, manufacturing and distribution operations. Businesses across the globe rely on the TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud to meet strategic goals in ensuring global compliance, improving on-time and in-full delivery, protecting product quality and reducing operational cost. For more information on TraceLink and our solutions, visit www.tracelink.com.

TraceLink is funded by FirstMark Capital. Based in New York City, FirstMark Capital is an early stage venture capital firm investing in visionary entrepreneurs who are creating new markets with innovative technology solutions or fundamentally changing existing markets by applying a fresh approach or new business model. FirstMark partners early in a company’s lifecycle, offering deep industry insight, a broad network of relationships and the operational expertise to build lasting businesses. Select historical investments include Riot Games (Acquired by Tencent); Duck Creek Technologies (Acquired by Accenture); Netgear (NASDAQ: NTGR); Boomi (Acquired by Dell); StubHub (Acquired by eBay); Netegrity (Acquired by CA); OutlookSoft (Acquired by SAP); and Navic Networks (Acquired by Microsoft). Current investments include: Pinterest, Knewton, Aereo, SecondMarket, Shopify and Lumosity. For more information, visit: www.firstmarkcap.com.