Veeva Systems: A Brief History

Matt Wallach is the co-founder and president of Veeva Systems (VEEV -0.29%), a cloud-based software company that got its start in the life-sciences industry. In this clip from Industry Focus: Healthcare, Matt describes how the company came to be and walks listeners through its history all the way to where the company is today.

Kristine Harjes: Hi, Matt! Thanks so much for coming onto Industry Focus today. Let's kick off with some background. Talk to me about how Veeva was created, and what the business does.

Matt Wallach: Sure. Thanks, Kristine, for having me on. It was a little bit of an unusual recipe to start a company. Peter Gassner and I had never met, and we lived 3,000 miles away. We got together because there was a shared idea that cloud computing was going to go in the same direction that client server and mainframe had before, and that is that, as it gets more and more mature, it gets more and more verticalized, more specific to specific industry segments. So no one had done that in the cloud yet at that time. So that was the original idea. Peter and I were a combination of Peter's deep expertise in Silicon Valley. He's really one of the best product guys in Silicon Valley and has attracted a great group of product people around there. Then I had a long background in life sciences, knowing what life-sciences companies look for in technology, the types of solutions that they need, the types of people that would be innovative and would potentially be an early adopter. That was the original combination -- deep Silicon Valley expertise with deep life-sciences expertise. 

The products that we have today basically come in two big packages. The Veeva Commercial Cloud is used by lots of pharma companies and biotech companies around the world to help them sell and market their products more effectively and efficiently around the world. It started as Veeva CRM, which was our first product, and now it's expanded to be all kinds of interaction management between life-sciences companies and their customers. So that could be face to face, over the phone, through the web, through video calls, through email. Really, all the interactions between our customers and their customers. It's also expanded to include things like the data that you would use to make a CRM product effective, and the content that you use to deliver the message in front of physicians, either face to face or through all those different channels. So that's the Commercial Cloud; that's where we started. 

Our second product line is called Vault. That's been a really big success for us as well. That's content management and data management, also in the cloud, for all kinds of life-sciences companies. That products spans from commercial and medical content, anything you might see in a doctor's office or the script that you would be read from if you were to call a call center, all the way through to regulatory, clinical, and quality. So all the important documentation gets collected during clinical trials, that you train people on in a quality manufacturing setting, and all the documents that go into regulatory submissions for new drugs and new indications around the world. The product set is pretty broad, which makes us a unique partner to the life-sciences industry as we try to build out this industry cloud.

Harjes: Who are your typical customers?

Wallach: Our customers are life-sciences companies large and small. It's large companies that you've heard of. Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, Novartis, and Amgen. It's also many smaller companies, either that are commercializing their very first drugs, or companies that are still in the clinical development stage that maybe you haven't heard of. It really is any life-sciences company from about the time they have 20 employees all the way up to the largest companies in the world.