• by Larissa Faw , January 8, 2021

Healthcare-focused agency group W2O continues its acquisition spree with the purchase of Swoop, a company that uses data and artificial intelligence techniques to help healthcare companies identify targeted groups of patient and healthcare professionals in specific disease and therapeutic categories.

It’s W2O’s ninth M&A deal in the past year. Terms weren’t disclosed.

The deal includes Swoop sibling IPM.ai, which leverages data and technology to accelerate research, development, and commercialization of therapies for under-defined patient populations, like those with rare diseases.

The two companies, which collectively have data for more than 300 million anonymized patients, will help expand W2O's health technology offerings in areas including clinical trial recruitment, audience activation and measurement. Previously, W2O obtained data from publicly available digital and social media sources through its audience analytics platform Symplur, which was acquired last year.

Swoop and IPM.ai will form a new “Health Technology Business” that consolidates W20’s data and technology assets, including the aforementioned Symplur.

The goal is to become the “Intel Inside” for the healthcare industry and provide direct-to-customer SaaS (software as a service) and DaaS (data as a service) solutions.

“This approach will enable our clients, their partners and our internal teams to deliver impact at scale to make the world a healthier place,” says Adam Cossman, Group President, Managing Partner of the newly formed Health Technologies Business, W20.

Ultimately, these moves will streamline how the company will design innovative solutions for healthcare companies, says Cossman. “It allows us to operate in a product-driven, technology-based environment – which sometimes needs to look and operate differently than our historical services model. Both are incredibly important to our future success, but creating a separate business will give us needed operational flexibility.”

Fueled by venture capital funding from New Mountain Capital in a partnership that began in 2019, W2O has evolved its business strategy to concentrate on tech-enablement over the past few years. The company reported more than $350 million in revenue in 2020, an increase of 50% from the prior year, and leaders expect to exceed $450 million in revenue in 2021.