Company name: CertiRx Corp.
Industry: pharmaceuticals (other).
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Location: Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
Solution/product: To prevent counterfeiting and fraud in pharmaceuticals and other industries including agriculture and manufacturing, CertiRx has developed platform technology for authentication and verification of high-value products.
For pharmaceuticals, CertiRx customizes its platform to allow liquid or pill medications to be encoded with tiny tags (made from already approved inactive drug ingredients) that provide detailed information about the drug, down to its specific batch number. When MedCity News wrote about the company in June of last year, it was looking to license its technology to large pharmaceutical companies.
Money raised: $312,520 of a $600,000 equity offering from five investors, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. This is the first time the company has filed an offering with the SEC, but last year it received a $30,000 loan from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.
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How it will be used: An inquiry sent to the company was not returned.
Investors: Five unnamed investors contributed.
Management team: Before a lengthy tenure in various roles around licensing, collaboration and product development management at Johnson & Johnson, President and CEO Tom Mercolino began his career at Becton Dixon and Co. as an inventor of a widely used HIV monitoring technology. He’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence at Carolina KickStart.
Market opportunity: With advancing mobile technologies, more companies are diving into the counterfeit drug prevention and detection space. PharmaSecure, for example, just launched a new mobile app for consumers, and Sproxil has a cloud-based mobile service for verifying medications. In a previous interview, Mercolino named ARmark Authentication Technologies and TruTag Technologies as the CertiRx’s closest competitors.
