goBalto

About goBalto

goBalto, Inc. operated as a specialized software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider focused on streamlining the initial phases of clinical trials for the life sciences industry.

The company was founded in 2008 by Jae Chung, a biotechnology industry veteran with a background as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company and as a co-founder of the biopharmaceutical firm Celltrion. Chung's experience in the biopharma space revealed a significant bottleneck in how clinical studies were initiated, a process heavily reliant on manual tracking via spreadsheets. This insight led him to establish goBalto to create web-based applications that would accelerate the timeline for getting new medicines to patients. The company, originally known as Pacbook, Inc., was established in Silicon Valley to specifically address these inefficiencies.

goBalto's business centered on a cloud-based platform designed to manage and accelerate the study startup process. This end-to-end system encompassed everything from site identification, feasibility assessments, and selection through to the final activation of clinical research sites. Its primary clients were pharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations (CROs), including major players like Pfizer, four of the top five CROs, and over two-thirds of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies. The company's revenue model was based on providing access to its software solutions. The platform offered features like `goBalto Select` for optimizing site selection and `goBalto Activate` for managing workflows, both supported by an analytics component, `goBalto Analyze`, which provided real-time visibility into timelines and budgets. A key benefit was a quantifiable reduction in study startup cycle times, reportedly by over 30%. This efficiency was a critical selling point, as the manual process could often take several months.

After operating for a decade and establishing a significant footprint with its solutions used at over 90,000 research sites across thousands of studies globally, goBalto was acquired by Oracle in October 2018. The acquisition integrated goBalto's study startup capabilities into the Oracle Health Sciences Cloud, aiming to create a comprehensive, end-to-end platform for managing the entire clinical trial lifecycle. At the time of the acquisition, Sujay Jadhav served as CEO, while founder Jae Chung was the company's President.