A 20-year saga ends with $5.7 billion

Dassault said yesterday that it would spend $5.7 billion to purchase Medidata, a New-York-based maker of software used to create clinical trials. It's a win for Medidata investors, but especially for the company's co-founders, Tarek Sherif and Glen de Vries, who founded Medidata in 1999 and have spent the last two decades building it.

STAT's Matthew Herper, who profiled the duo five years ago, describes them as a yin-and-yang pair. Sherif, the CEO, is circumspect, quiet, and imposing; de Vries is full of sprawling ideas and has a megawatt smile. The chemistry has worked. Medidata initially succeeded selling clinical trials software as a service — think SalesForce for pharma research — and managed to stay in the lead even after its main competition, a company called Phase Forward, was subsumed by Oracle.

One big question will be whether Medidata’s startup culture, which has resulted in aggressive sales growth (2018 sales were up 17% to $636 million) will be able to continue as part of a French company that knows a lot about software but not much about the incredibly weird business of pharma.