“People were coming up and saying: “I love this. When can I get it? Where has this been all my life?” - Blynksolve is the hot ticket in pharmaceutical manufacturing
An interview with Peter Blennerhasset (CEO) and Bartlomiej Baran (CTO), co-founders of Blynksolve, by Joe Gorman NDRC Programme Manager.
Peter and Bartek, Co-founders of Blynksolve
Meeting a co-founder is kind of like the dating scene. You have to go to events and put yourself out there. You have good conversations, weird interactions, and some days you might come to the conclusion that you’re better off alone. But for those that stay the course and find their perfect match, it’s all worth it in the end. Every co-founding team has its origin story, and for pharmaceutical startup Blynksolve, the meet-cute happened at Dogpatch Labs.
“I had just finished off a pretty intense manufacturing facility project with MSD Ireland and I wanted something a bit different,” says Peter Blennerhassett, a chemical and bioprocess engineer who worked at MSD and Pfizer before founding Blynksolve in 2022.
“I had played around with the idea of joining someone else's startup, then I just started going to events in Dogpatch and got talking to Bartek. I come from a very niche industry with a lot of problems but not many people leave it to enter the startup world. It was like going through a form of therapy with Bartek, talking about all these problems, when I realised there were a lot of areas that hadn’t been addressed yet. That was really how it started, just bouncing ideas around.”
Bartlomiej (Bartek) Baran had worked at startups including Eiratech Robotics and Manna Drone Delivery but “dropped everything” once he realised he had “never seen an opportunity like this.”
“I was inspired by Peter’s vision. I felt that this problem was already solved by other industries, such as construction and software, and now we could be the first to do it for pharma. And once I delivered some of the prototypes, the users got super excited about it. This gave me more and more energy and I said: “This is the real deal. It’s worth investing years to make this happen.” It’s an interesting idea, the business case is there, and it’s something that me and Peter can absolutely deliver.”
Blynksolve grabbed headlines when it scooped Innovation of the Year at the Pharma Industry Awards in late 2023 amidst a field of global entries. It’s trying to solve some of the communication and collaboration shortcomings in the pharmaceutical industry by building a digital knowledge twin for manufacturing processes. Users construct a picture of their process so that anyone in the company can understand each step, bridging knowledge gaps in a notoriously siloed industry. What does that look like?
Collaboration is the key word, “but with the control needed for pharma,” says Blennerhassett. “We’ve said we’re Github or Figma for pharma.” When you look at Blynksolve, it resembles a drawing board visualising the many complex processes that define pharma manufacturing, which accounts for 40% of the overall cost in bringing a drug to market. Lines and symbols denote the different stages of a complex process that usually involves hundreds of millions of euro and thousands of highly-qualified staff. Can a system that fabricates such refined end products afford inefficiencies?
Bartek, CTO of Blynksolve during NDRC Accelerator
“It's really, really inefficiently run, with a lot of overcomplication and bottlenecks. People within pharma are focused on their own section and a lot of the time on the back end is spent fixing issues that should’ve been caught already. One example is the ‘shakedown period’ where manufacturers expect a lot of issues, so they run batches over and over to shake them out. That can take nearly a year. There's so much money, time, and effort going into that process which is fundamentally flawed.”
Pharmaceutical executives think in multi-year cycles, so Blennerhassett and Baran know that they are playing the long game. Have they had pushback from highly risk-averse customers that are often hesitant to adopt new technology, especially from a startup?
“In the early days a lot of the responses were: “You're wrong. Surely there are ten other solutions out there, you just haven't come across them.” says Blennerhassett. They were undeterred. “We did our homework: over a hundred in-depth interviews across a huge number of companies. Everyone was saying the exact same thing.” Baran concurs: “It gave me so much energy to put my mind on it - I can Google it today and it still doesn’t exist.”
Bartek & Peter along with NDRC Accelerator H1 2024 Cohort
Blennerhassett still acknowledges that pharmaceutical procurement is “not fun,” but conversations with other successful biotech startup founders like Eddie Ryan of Kneat , Robert Fenton from Qualio, and Joe Hannon from Dynochem give him a lot of encouragement.
“There's a long line of people who have done this and I keep reminding myself of my conversations with them. Their insistence is: yes, this is a long game, but once you get over that wall, it's a great place to be and you can really make a huge difference. Look at Kneat. They really hit it out of the park with a niche use case for electronic validation. Now they're the best in the world at it. They're global leaders because they really understood the pain points.”
Breadcrumbs of validation have gradually become full loaves. “When we meet with engineers, quality, or automation specialists at pharma companies, they get very excited and want to start using the software quickly to assist them with their work, ” says Baran. “So even though the sales cycles are long and there are additional compliance requirements to meet, that demand from our end users keeps us awake day to day. On the other side, we realise that once a sale happens, it stays there for a long time, because the barrier to entry is so high.”
Blynksolve is working with one of the top global pharma manufacturers on a pilot project and its gong at the Pharma Industry Awards (decided by peers within the industry) drove huge inbound interest. After receiving funding from Enterprise Ireland’s Pre-Seed Start Fund and the NDRC Accelerator, it is on the lookout for “strategic value-add angels in the pharma space” later this year, and you feel they won’t be short of suitors. Blennerhassett is just back from a roadshow presenting Blynksolve where “people were approaching (me) to say: “I love this. When can I get it? Where has this been all my life?”
19 of the world’s top 20 pharma/biotech companies have a presence here in Ireland and while the chief decision makers are mostly in the US, Ireland isn’t a bad place to start. “Everyone knows everyone here, it’s a very open community,” says Blennerhassett. “Our long term goal is network-wide rollout across entire companies. A lot of those decisions are made in the US, but we will get to that stratospheric growth trajectory. It’s about building up data points here to de-risk that decision with local projects and local rollouts. You have to be patient.”
