Budget for scarcity, not abundance
−58%
Companies financed, H1 2022 → H1 2026 (capital −28%)
2027 move: lock in partner positions early; fewer, better-capitalised ventures are contested by peers.
How 24 pharmaceutical companies balance digital health strategy against the strength of their partner portfolios. Select any company to see what drives its position.
Foreword
Last year, this Index set out to separate the effective from the merely active. In 2026, the market began asking that question on its own. The era of collecting digital health partnerships is giving way to an era of converting them, and the distance between the companies that can do so and those that cannot is now the real story. This sixth edition measures that distance across 24 pharmaceutical companies, on two independent axes: the strategy each expresses through its partnerships, and the strength of the partner portfolio it has built over the past three years. A company can lead on one and lag on the other, which is why we plot them separately rather than collapsing them into a single score.
The hurdles this year have been real. Clinical execution has become pharma’s defining R&D bottleneck, yet the ventures built to relieve it remain starved of capital relative to discovery. Investors grew more selective, and consolidation added a new exposure: when a widely partnered vendor is acquired by one pharma company, its neutrality disappears overnight, and vendor ownership becomes a strategic risk.
The successes are more instructive, and this year’s rankings make one point unmistakable: size and strength are different things. Regeneron, new this year, leads the Portfolio Score from one of the smallest recent portfolios, while Eli Lilly reaches the top group with the largest — proof that scale and quality can coexist. AstraZeneca holds the Balanced Scorecard lead for a third year, and just six companies, led by Novartis, now sit in the Proactive quadrant, down from eight in 2025.
For investors, partnership portfolios belong in the valuation, not the appendix: what matters is how many partners have produced evidence, and which are embedded in core workflows. For pharma leaders, scouting is no longer the scarce capability — the machinery that turns a pilot into a repeatable operating decision is. For innovators, the generic pitch is finished; evidence, integration and fit to a specific bottleneck now decide who is selected.
Powered by HealthTech Alpha, which tracks more than 17,000 digital health ventures, the Index is grounded in repeat partnerships, clinical evidence and real-world integration rather than press releases or perception. The era of collecting partnerships has ended; the era of converting them has begun.
Dashed lines mark the median on each axis. Both axes are scaled so the lowest company scores 0 and the highest 1. Swipe the chart sideways on small screens.
Balanced Scorecard Ranking
The Balanced Scorecard evaluates a pharmaceutical company’s digital transformation strategy through its partnerships with digital health ventures, structured around four balanced perspectives that together measure strategic progress and innovation capacity. The score is the average of the four.
AstraZeneca leads for a third consecutive year, with Pfizer again in the top three. Roche ranks third and Novartis fourth. These companies sit above the field median on most pillars and take the maximum Internal Processes score from deep Research Solutions and Clinical Trials partnering.
Strategy and portfolio remain separate tests, however: several of the strategy leaders rank well down the portfolio-strength table, where a high score depends on the quality of recently partnered ventures rather than the breadth of the overall portfolio.
The gold line on each bar marks the median across the 24 companies; the dot beside each name shows its Explorer quadrant. Pillar cells are shaded by score (0–1). Scores are shown before the 0–1 rescaling used on the Explorer matrix; the rank order is the same, and ranks use unrounded scores. 2025 ranks are from the published 2025 top ten; “—” means the company was outside it. Select a company to open its profile in the Explorer.
Portfolio Score Ranking
A strong digital health partnership portfolio reduces the risk of partnership failure (though this can never be eliminated) and helps secure a minimum time-to-market for the product. But strength on this axis is not the same as success. Leaning too heavily on mature, de-risked ventures can narrow the room for genuine co-development and limit exposure to the earlier-stage innovators that reshape a field; the most valuable partnerships often carry more uncertainty than a portfolio of established names. A high score signals quality and momentum in what a company has recently chosen, not an assured return.
The Portfolio Score assesses ventures partnered, announced or expanded within the past three years, giving a view of current strategic focus rather than legacy activity.
Regeneron leads the 2026 ranking with one of the three smallest recent portfolios in the Index and its highest average team score. Among the companies with larger recent portfolios, Novartis, Merck KGaA and Novo Nordisk stand out for pairing scale with strong venture quality.
Eli Lilly ranks among the leaders with by far the largest recent portfolio in the Index. It is the clearest sign this year that scale and quality can coexist, and the reason portfolio size alone says little about portfolio strength.
The gold line on each bar marks the median across the 24 companies; the dot beside each name shows its Explorer quadrant. Evidence rate is the share of ventures in evidence-relevant clusters with proven evidence of benefit. Scores are shown before the 0–1 rescaling used on the Explorer matrix; the rank order is the same, and ranks use unrounded scores. 2025 ranks are from the published 2025 top ten; “—” means the company was outside it. Astellas Pharma, joint first in 2025, is not among the 24 companies assessed in 2026. Select a company to open its profile in the Explorer.
Top 10 by key business areas
To better understand the venture portfolios, it is helpful to consider the strength of each based on two key strategic business areas: Research & Development, and Patient Support Programmes (PSP). This year the patient lens moves from engagement to support, reflecting where pharma is now building capability after the prescription.
The Portfolio Strength of the partnerships announced over the past three years was evaluated separately for the ventures in each pharma’s portfolio with solutions in the Research Solutions and Clinical Trials clusters, and for those in Patient Solutions (now including the Patient Engagement category) or offering tools for adherence and awareness.
This perspective shows the recent focus areas of each pharma. Regeneron, new to the Index, takes the top spot for the best-performing R&D ventures, and Novo Nordisk tops the list for Patient Support Programme portfolios. Eli Lilly is the only company in the top two of both.
Research Solutions and Clinical Trials · movement vs 2025
Leaving the top 10: Gilead Sciences, Bayer, Takeda. Astellas Pharma is no longer in the Index.
Patient Solutions, Patient Engagement, adherence and awareness · movement vs 2025 Patient Engagement list
Leaving the top 10: Servier.
Regeneron’s position comes from concentration rather than scale. Almost a quarter of its digital health partners are recent R&D ventures, spanning real-world data and trial enablement, and every one that needs clinical evidence has it. Eli Lilly holds the largest recent R&D portfolio in the Index, with 23 ventures including AI discovery partners such as Isomorphic Labs, Insitro and Chai Discovery.
The biggest climbers are Boehringer Ingelheim, up nine places to fourth with 13 recent R&D ventures, and GSK, up fourteen places to eighth. Servier, last year’s leader, remains in the top five.
Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly have built the deepest patient support portfolios of the past three years, with 15 and 23 ventures respectively. Many sit around obesity and cardiometabolic care, including weight-management and telehealth platforms such as Ro, knownwell and Form Health.
Daiichi Sankyo, Eisai and Otsuka Pharmaceutical remain in the top six. Their portfolios are smaller, but a large share of recent partners are patient-focused, and these ventures meet the evidence bar.
For this analysis the Portfolio Strength method — venture maturity, team strength and clinical evidence — is applied to the ventures in each focus area, then adjusted for the share of the pharma’s portfolio that the focus area represents. The share is used only for this Value Chain view and is not part of the main Portfolio Score. Clusters follow Galen Growth’s Digital Health Taxonomy.
Source: HealthTech Alpha by Galen Growth. Partnerships announced 30 September 2023 to 29 September 2026. The 2025 patient comparison refers to the Top Patient Engagement Portfolio list, which used a narrower scope.
Most active ventures
APAC is where pharma–venture partnering has accelerated most over the past two years. Ten of the 15 ventures with the most new pharma partnerships are based in Japan, South Korea, China or Hong Kong, and most of their new partners are domestic or regional pharma companies rather than the global top 25. FRONTEO (14), Insilico Medicine (12) and JD Health (11) lead the ranking, and for FRONTEO and Galux nearly all of their pharma partnerships were announced in this period.
| Rank | Venture | Partnerships (past 2 yrs) | Partnerships (all time) | Primary cluster / category | Founded | Pharma partners – past 2 years | Other Pharma Innovation Index 2026 partners (earlier) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | FRONTEOJapan | 14 | 16 | Health Management Solutions / Clinical Decision Intelligence | 2003 | Astellas Pharma, Nippon Kayaku, Glycotechnology Institute, TAGCyx Biotechnologies, Nippon Shinyaku, NB Health Laboratory, NICCA Chemical, Maruho, Fuji Pharma, Chugai Pharmaceutical, EA Pharma, Shionogi, Eisai, Daiichi Sankyo | – |
| 2 | Insilico MedicineHong Kong | 12 | 33 | Research Solutions / Drug Discovery | 2014 | Bora Pharmaceuticals, Takeda, SK Biopharmaceuticals, Ribo Life Science, Tenacia Biotechnology, ASKA Pharmaceutical, Qilu Pharmaceutical, Servier, TaiGen Biotechnology, Eli Lilly, Harbour BioMed, Stemline Therapeutics | Sanofi, MSD, Merck KGaA, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer |
| 3 | JD HealthChina | 11 | 20 | Online Marketplace / Consumer Marketplace | 2010 | CF PharmTech, Guang Yu Yuan, Peak Pharmaceutical, Boehringer Ingelheim, Novartis, Bayer, Guangzhou Pharmaceutical Holdings, Eli Lilly, Innovent Bio, Novo Nordisk, Merck KGaA | Sanofi, UCB Pharma, AstraZeneca, GSK, Gilead Sciences, Roche, Eisai |
| 4 | XtalPiChina | 7 | 20 | Research Solutions / Drug Discovery | 2015 | DoveTree Medicines, PharmaEngine, Huadong Medicine, Weisheng Pharmaceuticals, Sunshine Lake Pharma, UCB Pharma, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine | Eli Lilly, Merck KGaA, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, Pfizer |
| 5 | GencurixSouth Korea | 7 | 13 | Medical Diagnostics / Omics Related Diagnosis | 2011 | CNPharm, Hyundai Bio, Penetrium Bio, Bio-Rad Laboratories, QIAGEN, Roche, Myungmoon Pharmaceutical | – |
| 6 | GaluxSouth Korea | 6 | 6 | Research Solutions / Drug Discovery | 2020 | AstraZeneca, GC Biopharma, OliX Pharmaceuticals, ISU Abxis, Boehringer Ingelheim, Celltrion | – |
| 7 | MediiJapan | 5 | 11 | Telemedicine / Teleconsultation | 2020 | Teijin Pharma, Asahi Kasei Therapeutics, Chugai Pharmaceutical, Amgen, Bristol-Myers Squibb | Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim |
| 8 | GoodRxUnited States | 5 | 10 | Online Marketplace / Consumer Marketplace | 2015 | Eli Lilly, Currax, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Perrigo | Boehringer Ingelheim, Sanofi, Biogen |
| 9 | QureightUnited Kingdom | 5 | 9 | Clinical Trials / Data Collection Tools | 2018 | Mediar Therapeutics, Calluna Pharma, Remedy Cell, Vicore Pharma, Avalyn Pharma | AstraZeneca, Roche, Takeda |
| 10 | NateraUnited States | 5 | 8 | Medical Diagnostics / Omics Related Diagnosis | 2007 | Angiex, Aveta Biomics, Eledon Pharmaceuticals, CytoDyn, Exelixis | MSD |
| 11 | X-ChemUnited States | 4 | 30 | Research Solutions / Bioinformatics | 2010 | IntelliSyn, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, Orion Pharma, Tonix Pharmaceuticals | Servier, Roche, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AbbVie, Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, Gilead Sciences, Bayer, Sanofi, Pfizer, AstraZeneca |
| 12 | BenchlingUnited States | 4 | 24 | Research Solutions / Bioinformatics | 2012 | Ginkgo Bioworks, Lilly TuneLab, MSD, Novonesis | Gilead Sciences, Sanofi, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Eisai, Daiichi Sankyo, Regeneron, AstraZeneca, Servier |
| 13 | Ali HealthChina | 4 | 13 | Population Health Management / Integrated Solutions | 2008 | Bayer, Eli Lilly, Innovent Bio, Novo Nordisk | Roche, AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Merck KGaA, GSK |
| 14 | Pharos iBioSouth Korea | 4 | 8 | Research Solutions / Bioinformatics | 2016 | CoBX Bio, Eli Lilly, Kolon Pharmaceutical, Macrogen | – |
| 15 | ElixJapan | 4 | 7 | Research Solutions / Drug Discovery | 2016 | Kyorin Pharmaceutical, Eisai, Life Intelligence Consortium, PRISM BioLab | – |
A second group built deep pharma portfolios earlier and still rely on those established relationships. X-Chem, Benchling, TriNetX, AbCellera and Iktos each count more than 20 pharma partners since incorporation, yet announced only one to four new pharma partnerships in the past two years. Many of these ventures have also matured or changed ownership: of the twelve, three have been acquired, five are publicly listed and four remain private. 100doc and Apricot Forest have announced no pharma partnerships in the past three years — Apricot Forest’s last was in 2016, and 100doc has none dated in HealthTech Alpha.
| Rank | Venture | Partnerships (all time) | Partnerships (past 2 yrs) | Primary cluster / category | Founded | Current status | Most recent (year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Insilico MedicineHong Kong | 33 | 12 | Research Solutions / Drug Discovery | 2014 | Public (HKEX: 3696) | 2026 |
| 2 | X-ChemUnited States | 30 | 4 | Research Solutions / Bioinformatics | 2010 | Acquired (GHO Capital) | 2025 |
| 3 | Fangzhou (Jianke)China | 27 | 3 | Patient Solutions / Disease Management | 2007 | Public (HKEX: 6086) | 2025 |
| 4 | BenchlingUnited States | 24 | 4 | Research Solutions / Bioinformatics | 2012 | Private | 2026 |
| 5 | TriNetXUnited States | 23 | 2 | Clinical Trials / Clinical Trial Matching | 2013 | Majority investment (Carlyle) | 2026 |
| 6 | AbCelleraCanada | 22 | 1 | Research Solutions / Drug Discovery | 2020 | Public (NASDAQ: ABCL) | 2026 |
| 6 | IktosFrance | 22 | 1 | Research Solutions / Drug Discovery | 2016 | Private | 2026 |
| 8 | CUCO HealthBrazil | 21 | 0 | Patient Solutions / Disease Management | 2015 | Acquired (Raia Drogasil) | n/a |
| 9 | JD HealthChina | 20 | 11 | Online Marketplace / Consumer Marketplace | 2010 | Public (HKEX: 6618) | 2026 |
| 10 | XtalPiChina | 20 | 7 | Research Solutions / Drug Discovery | 2015 | Public (HKEX: 2228) | 2026 |
| 11 | 100docSouth Korea | 20 | 0 | Telemedicine / Teleconsultation | 2014 | Private | n/a |
| 11 | Apricot ForestChina | 20 | 0 | Clinical Decision Support / Clinical Reference | 2014 | Private | 2016 |
Source: HealthTech Alpha by Galen Growth, extracted 29 September 2026. Pharma = corporates classified as “Pharmaceutical” in HealthTech Alpha, not limited to the 24-company Index. Past 2 years = partnerships announced 29 Sep 2024 – 28 Sep 2026.
Counts are distinct pharma partners per venture; duplicate corporate records are counted once, and “all time” includes partnerships without a recorded date. Subsidiaries are credited to their parent (Genentech → Roche, Alexion → AstraZeneca, Kite → Gilead, Allergan → AbbVie). The “Other Pharma Innovation Index 2026 partners” column lists only earlier partners that are companies in this Index. Ties are ranked by the secondary metric. Foundation Medicine (Roche subsidiary) is excluded. Current status is the legal status recorded in HealthTech Alpha.
The Optimal Mix
Digital health leadership takes more than a collection of highly mature ventures. Strong evidence, experienced teams and proven technologies reduce execution risk, but leaning too heavily on established partners limits a pharma company’s capacity to experiment, differentiate and anticipate emerging needs. The strongest performers build portfolios that balance stability with strategic boldness, pairing dependable, mature ventures with a select group of high-potential innovators. That balanced, forward-looking mix is what defines companies in the “Proactive” quadrant of the Balanced Scorecard–Portfolio Strength matrix: above the median on both strategy and portfolio strength.
These leaders succeed because they:
In practice, the optimal mix is not about chasing maturity; it is about curating a portfolio that can deliver today and reshape tomorrow. Companies in the “Proactive” quadrant show this balance, combining security with edge to drive sustained digital health transformation. Six companies meet that standard in 2026, compared with eight in 2025. Novartis again sits at the head of the Proactive group, ranking fourth on both strategy and portfolio strength. It is joined in the Proactive quadrant by Eli Lilly, UCB Pharma, MSD, Boehringer Ingelheim and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Select a company to open its profile in the Explorer tab, where each company’s scorecard pillars, portfolio quality and partnership activity are shown in full.
2027 outlook
Participation is settled: the thirteen largest portfolios hold 1,730 digital health partnerships between them. The 2027 question is what that portfolio is worth, and who is accountable for turning it into value. Five shifts should shape pharma's plans.
For five years, the question pharma asked of digital health was whether it was participating. The answer is now settled: the thirteen largest portfolios hold 1,730 digital health partnerships between them. The 2027 question is harder. What is that portfolio worth, and who is accountable for turning it into value? Most 2027 budgets are being written into a market that has industrialised, with fewer companies, larger cheques, older acquisition targets and buyers who pay for proof.
1. Budget for scarcity, not abundance. H1 2026 digital health funding reached $17.46bn across 601 rounds, compared with $24.41bn across 1,433 rounds in H1 2022. Capital fell 28%, while the number of financed companies fell 58%. The mature, evidenced ventures pharma wants are also wanted by peers, technology corporates and acquirers: 31.6% of partnering ventures signed two or more corporate partners within a single half-year. Pharma should secure strategic partner positions early. It should also note that early-stage rounds fell from 760 to 282, because the ventures that will be partnership-ready in 2030 are being seeded now.
2. Spend where the time is lost. Clinical trials consume more than half of R&D spend. Yet in 2025 the Clinical Trials cluster raised $350m in venture equity, against $4.5bn for Research Solutions, a gap of roughly 13×. Discovery is accelerating while cycle times lengthen. In 2027, pharma should commit to a reference architecture spanning trial design, patient matching, decentralised execution and data collection. It should also buy outcomes (enrolment speed, amendment rates, data quality) rather than hours.
3. Build the system around the medicine. Value is increasingly realised after the prescription. Patient support ventures show the pattern: 281 ventures and $5.9bn raised, with funding rounds falling to 29 in 2025 while pharma partnerships reached 55. Capabilities such as identity, consent, enrolment, data exchange and measurement should become shared infrastructure across brands and markets. Only what is genuinely therapy-specific should stay brand-level. The hybrid medicine only works if support never becomes surveillance.
4. Treat every partner as a potential acquisition. H1 2026 saw 83 M&A transactions against a single IPO, and the average acquired venture was 10.7 years old. Roche's acquisition of PathAI, worth up to $1.05bn, turned a neutral vendor with ten announced pharma partners into a competitor-owned asset overnight. Before signing, map each partner's likely acquirers. Negotiate data rights, change-of-control terms and firewalls, and dual-source critical capabilities. Vendor acquisition risk is now a standing portfolio discipline, not an occasional legal review.
5. Fund AI by workflow, not by label. Ventures that marketed themselves as AI raised rounds 39% larger than their peers in H1 2022. By H1 2026 their rounds were 16% smaller. AI has become a component rather than a category, so the budget should follow the workflow it changes. That means three pools: automation of processes already measured, decision support embedded in clinical or operational workflow, and the infrastructure that makes both work (data quality, interoperability and model governance). An AI budget without the third pool is a pilot budget wearing a strategy label.
Measure conversion, not collection. Partnership volume across the major portfolios fell from 149 in 2023 to 115 in 2025. That is a filter, not a retreat. The share of evidence-needing partners that reach evidence grade ranges from 100% at Merck KGaA to 52% at Sanofi, and portfolio size does not predict it. For 2027, the metrics that matter are:
Each strategic relationship also needs a named owner, so the asset survives the next reorganisation.
Source: HealthTech Alpha by Galen Growth. H1 2026 data as of September 2026; 2025 full-year cluster data as of April 2026; partnership portfolio data (13 companies) as of August 2026.
PHARMA INNOVATION INDEX 2026 · METHODOLOGY
The Index places each company on two independent axes. The Balanced Scorecard measures the strategy a company expresses through its digital health partnerships; Portfolio Strength measures the quality of the partners it has chosen over the last three years. A company can lead on one axis and lag on the other, which is why the two are plotted separately rather than combined into a single score.
The equally weighted average of four perspectives: Commercial, Patient & HCP, Internal Processes, and Learning & Growth. Each is built from a company's full partnership history, its direct-to-patient presence, and its recent partnering activity relative to its size.
A weighted assessment of the ventures a company has partnered with in the last three years: their maturity (50%), the strength of their management teams (25%), and whether they have generated real-world evidence (25%).
The perspectives are interdependent. Learning & Growth investments build capabilities that improve Internal Processes, which enhance the value delivered through the Commercial and Patient perspectives, ultimately creating durable competitive advantage.
Whether the company is building sustainable revenue channels and engaging patients directly. Measured from the extent of its direct-to-patient (DTP) platforms and the share of diagnostic solutions in its portfolio. DTP is scored on a five-point scale, from a full patient-facing platform spanning remote diagnosis, telehealth, pharmacy, disease management and insurtech, down to physician-mediated support or a passing mention.
How effectively partnerships serve patients and healthcare professionals, and how well they reinforce the company's core therapeutic areas. Three attributes, averaged: the share of patient support programmes in the portfolio (the Patient Solutions cluster together with the Patient Engagement category), therapeutic-area alignment between the partnership portfolio and the company's R&D pipeline, and geographic diversity across the six world regions.
How partnerships strengthen core pharmaceutical operations and R&D productivity. Measured from the share of ventures in Research Solutions (TechBio) and Clinical Trials. Each share is assessed against a target level rather than a maximum, so a portfolio weighted too heavily toward either is not rewarded without limit.
Whether the company is scaling its innovation culture. Measured as the volume of partnering activity relative to company size (number of employees), blended equally with the absolute scale of the portfolio so that the smallest companies do not top the axis on size alone. Recent activity — the trailing two years — is weighted more heavily than the all-time total.
Portfolio Strength considers only partnerships announced or expanded in the past three years. Long-standing collaborations still add value, but a recent-partnership view gives a sharper read on current priorities and momentum. The axis draws on three HealthTech Alpha signals:
Within each metric, raw values are normalised to a 0–1 scale across the 24 companies, so every position is relative to the current peer group. Two normalisation styles are used. Most metrics are scaled between the field minimum and maximum. The Internal Processes shares and therapeutic-area alignment instead use a target level: a company that sits above the target is scored by its distance back from it, so an over-concentrated portfolio is penalised rather than rewarded. On both final axes the lowest company scores 0 and the highest scores 1 — the endpoints are always occupied, however tight or dispersed the field.
The matrix is divided into four quadrants at the median of each axis. Proactive companies sit above the median on both; the other three quadrants — Strategy-led, Portfolio-led and Developing — follow from which single axis, if either, is above its median.
Partnership, venture and signal data are sourced from HealthTech Alpha by Galen Growth. Company R&D pipeline mix, used for therapeutic-area alignment, is drawn from Evaluate Pharma. Employee counts are taken from company annual reports. Companies are neither required nor incentivised to contribute. Where a company has independently confirmed partnership activity not present in HealthTech Alpha, that activity is included and noted on the company's panel; such confirmations are verified directly but are not independently reproducible.
Based on the Galen Growth Digital Health Innovation Index 2025 methodology, updated for the 2026 edition.