Inspiration and Problem Solving: Condor's Core Functionalities

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Jennifer Kyle, CEO and founder of Condor, discusses the inspiration behind creating a financial cloud platform for biopharma R&D. During the beginning of her career in auditing and finance, she repeatedly encountered the same financial management challenges across various biotech companies. This led her to develop Condor, a platform that integrates clinical and financial systems, providing a unified system of record for accruals, vendor oversight, budgeting, and forecasting. Future plans include advanced AI and machine learning for benchmarking and deeper integrations with clinical systems.

Pharmaceutical Executive: What inspired you to create a financial cloud platform specifically for biopharma research and development? What problem were you aiming to solve?

Jennifer Kyle: I would say I didn't go looking for this, it found me pretty organically. My background is in finance and accounting. I started my career at Ernst and Young auditing a lot of biotech companies and going through IPOs. Initially, I thought I wanted to be a CFO, so I left Ernst and Young and went into the industry to climb the corporate ladder, gain experience, and eventually get that corner office at the top. Along that journey, I realized that I didn't know what I wanted to do.

I was really good at solving problems at the intersection of operations, FP&A, and accounting. I loved making business processes more efficient and effective. I loved to come in, add value, and make things better—that was like my superpower. I saw a lot of companies that had all of these financial projects on backlog, but didn't really have time in their day-to-day to clean things up. I love doing it and I'm good at it, so I decided to offer my services and help as many companies as I can. That's really where it started.

I got a phone call from a clinical stage, publicly traded biotech company saying they needed somebody to come in to help clean up their clinical accruals. They wanted to use the information to help with some financial planning. Additionally, they had to become 404b SOX compliant, so they needed to step up their internal controls and create a process around compliance. That turned into a comprehensive workbook that connected a lot of the clinical stakeholders and data to the financial and accounting processes, workflows, and compliance. That was such a success at this biotech company that I kept getting called to other biotech companies to go do the same thing.

Over and over, I realized it was the same problem. I wondered if there was any software out there to automate this, because surely there had to be something better than an Excel spreadsheet.

I talked to big pharma companies, small biotech companies, and what I realized was two things: the big organizations build a homegrown database, the small organizations use an Excel spreadsheet, and nobody understands the process. Not the auditors that audit it, not the clinical folks that are managing their contracts and vendors, and certainly not the finance people. I just decided at that point that there's a market for it, and If I didn't build it, somebody else would.

So, I said, ‘Why not? Let's do it.’ That's when my career completely shifted from going from accounting to finance, to business process consultant, to tech entrepreneur, and it's been a really fun ride. Every company is trying to solve the same challenges over and over, and I'm just stoked that we can offer the market some solution here.