Company Background

You are interviewing for a Strategy & Analytics lead role at Evidentra, a Series B healthtech company building software for clinical research teams. Evidentra’s core product is a cloud-based “study operations hub” used by biotech and academic medical centers to manage protocols, IRB submissions, and site communications. The company has $42M ARR, growing 28% YoY, with ~320 enterprise customers (biotechs, CROs, and top-50 academic medical centers). Retention is strong (gross revenue retention 94%), but net revenue retention has slowed to 108% as customers consolidate vendors and push back on seat expansion.

Evidentra’s CEO believes the next growth vector is upstream: helping researchers design better studies before protocol finalization. The product team has prototyped an AI-assisted literature review and evidence synthesis module called Evidentra Review. It ingests PDFs and abstracts, extracts PICO elements (Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcomes), summarizes findings, flags contradictions, and proposes candidate endpoints and inclusion/exclusion criteria.

This is not a generic “paper summarizer.” The aspiration is a workflow that can go from question → structured evidence table → draft study design with traceable citations. The bet: if Evidentra becomes the system of record for evidence synthesis, it can expand into protocol authoring, feasibility, and eventually real-world evidence.

Strategic Situation (Why Now)

Two things have changed in the last 12 months:

1. Competitive pressure: a well-funded startup, LitSynth, has landed several marquee biopharma logos with an AI literature review tool priced aggressively. Meanwhile, incumbents like Elsevier (Embase/Scopus) and Clarivate (Web of Science) are adding AI features and bundling them into existing subscriptions.

2. Customer behavior shift: research teams are experimenting with LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude) for early discovery, but compliance teams are increasingly concerned about hallucinations, citation integrity, and IP leakage. Several Evidentra customers have issued internal guidance: “LLMs allowed only if outputs are auditable and sources are verifiable.”

Evidentra’s board has asked for a concrete strategy: should Evidentra Review be launched as (a) a standalone product, (b) an add-on to the existing platform, or (c) an enterprise bundle aimed at regulated biopharma workflows? The decision matters because it will drive product scope (audit trails, validation, SOC2/GxP posture), partnerships (content licensing), and go-to-market motion.

Market Context & Data

Evidentra has done preliminary discovery with 26 customers (10 biotech, 8 CRO, 8 academic). Common pain points:

• Literature review takes 4–10 weeks for a new indication, often involving 2–5 researchers.
• Teams struggle to keep reviews current; updates are manual and inconsistent.
• Protocol design decisions (endpoints, inclusion/exclusion) are often based on incomplete synthesis.

Customer Segments (Evidentra’s current ICPs)

Competitive Landscape (simplified)

Evidentra’s Current Economics (baseline)

• Average contract value (existing platform): $130k/year
• Sales cycle: 4.5 months mid-market; 9–12 months enterprise
• Gross margin: 78% (cloud + support)
• Current sales team: 18 AEs (12 mid-market, 6 enterprise), 6 solutions engineers, 10 CSMs

Product Constraints (given by CTO)

• To launch Review with “enterprise-grade” audit trails and validation, engineering estimates 9 months and $4.5M incremental spend.
• A lighter-weight MVP (PDF ingestion + evidence table + citations, limited validation) could ship in 4 months for $1.5M.
• Content licensing (optional) could cost $0.8M–$2.0M/year depending on scope; legal says this is negotiable but time-consuming.

Your Role

You are the acting Head of Strategy reporting to the CEO. You have 2 weeks to prepare a recommendation for the board meeting.

Deliverables (What you need to answer)

1. Market sizing: Estimate TAM/SAM/SOM for AI-assisted literature review and evidence-to-study-design workflows for Evidentra’s target segments over the next 3 years.
2. Competitive analysis: Use a structured lens (e.g., Porter’s Five Forces) to assess defensibility and likely competitive responses.
3. Strategy for literature reviews informing study design: Propose a practical, repeatable approach that Evidentra Review should operationalize (e.g., systematic search, screening, extraction, bias assessment, synthesis, traceability) and how it becomes a product moat.
4. Go-to-market recommendation: Choose between standalone vs add-on vs bundle (or a hybrid), including pricing and packaging.
5. Execution plan: Provide a phased 12–18 month plan with milestones, resourcing, and success metrics.

Constraints

• Budget available for this initiative: $5M incremental over the next 12 months.
• Must maintain SOC2; enterprise customers are asking about GxP-aligned validation even if not strictly required.
• Cannot rely on training models on customer proprietary documents without explicit opt-in.
• Board expects evidence of a path to +$10M ARR attributable to Review within 24 months (direct or expansion).