Evidence Partners

About Evidence Partners

Evidence Partners, now operating as DistillerSR Inc., is a Kanata-based company specializing in AI-enabled software for automating literature reviews. The firm was established in December 2008 by co-founders Peter O'Blenis, Jonathan Barker, and Ian Stefanison. They identified a need to streamline the time-consuming and labor-intensive process of conducting systematic literature reviews, which at the time were primarily used in academic research. The idea originated when the founders, while at a previous company providing clinical trial data management software, were introduced to the manual challenges of systematic reviews by a research team at a research hospital. Peter O'Blenis, who has a background in computer science and an MBA, became president in 2016 and CEO in 2019.

The company's core product is DistillerSR, a SaaS platform launched in 2009 designed to manage and automate the evidence-based research process. This web-based software helps research organizations conduct literature reviews for health technology assessments, regulatory submissions, and post-market surveillance. It achieves this by using AI and intelligent workflows to automate tasks such as managing literature collection, screening references, detecting duplicates, and assessing data, aiming to reduce review times by 35-50%. The platform features include AI-powered screening to prioritize relevant references, AI audit to identify accidentally excluded references, integrations with data providers like PubMed and Embase, and configurable reporting tools, including PRISMA diagrams. DistillerSR is designed to be highly configurable to support various workflows and can handle large-scale projects with over 700,000 references each. The business model is based on annual subscriptions to the software, with an enterprise plan available for larger organizations.

Initially self-funded, Evidence Partners experienced significant growth as the demand for literature reviews expanded beyond academia into regulatory processes for pharmaceuticals and medical devices. The company secured its first round of venture capital in July 2022, raising $20 million CAD in a growth financing round led by Thomvest Ventures. This funding was intended to accelerate global expansion and increase staff in product, engineering, sales, and marketing. The company serves a global client base of over 300 organizations, which includes more than 60% of the world's largest pharmaceutical and medical device companies, as well as contract research organizations (CROs), government agencies, and academic institutions. In September 2022, Evidence Partners rebranded to DistillerSR Inc. to align the corporate identity with its well-recognized product name.