BranchLab raises $26M to transform pharma commercialization with privacy-first AI

Drugmakers sit on mountains of patient and healthcare data. The problem has never been a lack of access to information. The problem is speed.

Marketing, audience targeting, patient outreach, and campaign measurement inside the pharmaceutical industry still move through a maze of disconnected vendors, delayed analytics, spreadsheets, and compliance reviews that can stretch for weeks or months. By the time teams react, the opportunity may already be gone.

That bottleneck helped convince investors to back BranchLab with a $26 million Series A round led by McKesson Ventures. The financing included participation from FCA Venture Partners, Sanofi Ventures, and AIX Ventures, bringing the company’s total funding to $35 million.

“This milestone reflects the progress we are making toward a fundamental shift in healthcare commercialization,” BranchLab said in a post on LinkedIn.

BranchLab is building an AI platform to address one of pharma’s oldest operational headaches: turning healthcare data into actionable commercial insights without exposing sensitive patient information.

The startup says its system allows pharmaceutical companies and their agencies to identify audiences, activate campaigns, and optimize outreach in near real time. The company claims the platform has produced an average increase of nearly 70% in marketing efficacy across multiple therapeutic areas.

“Pharma has long had access to rich data, but using it quickly—and responsibly—has been the challenge,” said Josh Walsh, CEO of BranchLab. “BranchLab solves this by turning privacy-safe, aggregated data into real-time insights that connect directly to activation. Teams can move faster, reach the right audiences more effectively, and drive better outcomes without relying on sensitive or individual-level information.”

The pitch lands at a moment when healthcare companies are under growing pressure to modernize commercial operations without crossing privacy lines. AI tools are flooding nearly every corner of healthcare, yet many pharmaceutical systems still operate in silos built long before today’s AI boom.

BranchLab says its technology runs models inside customer-controlled environments using a transformer-based architecture built for regulated healthcare settings. The platform uses non-sensitive demographic and media-side signals rather than relying on individual-level health data.

That distinction matters in healthcare, where compliance rules and patient privacy concerns can stall AI adoption.

“The more we learned about BranchLab, the more we saw the possibility to transform the way patients learn about and get started on the right therapies,” said Carrie Williams, partner at McKesson Ventures. “Combining a deep understanding of the patient journey with a future-proofed approach to patient activation could enable an evolved patient therapy experience, one that seamlessly bridges privacy-first audience targeting with patient access, affordability, and preference.”

The company says workflows that once took months can now be compressed into minutes.

That efficiency pitch is becoming increasingly attractive across the pharmaceutical industry as companies search for ways to lower customer acquisition costs, improve therapy adoption, and tighten measurement around marketing spend.

“Pharma has spent years investing in data and analytics, but much of it still lives outside of production systems,” said Andrew Bouldin. “BranchLab’s approach to running models within regulated environments and connecting them directly to execution is a fundamental shift in how commercialization can work. We see this as a meaningful step toward making pharma’s data and activation systems work together in real time.”

Healthcare investors are increasingly betting that the next wave of AI winners will come from infrastructure companies that can operate within regulated industries, rather than from generic AI tools built for broad consumer use.

That trend has pushed more venture money into startups focused on healthcare workflows, compliance-safe AI systems, and enterprise data environments that large pharmaceutical companies can actually deploy.

“Healthcare is entering a new era of responsible AI within regulated environments,” said Cris De Luca. “BranchLab has the potential to become a core commercial intelligence layer, putting this capability directly in the hands of pharma teams to connect therapies with patients across next-generation digital environments.”

BranchLab plans to use the new funding to expand enterprise deployments, deepen integrations across healthcare and media systems, and continue developing its commercialization platform.

The company is betting that the future of pharmaceutical marketing will look less like fragmented ad buying and more like real-time operating systems powered by AI.