Hyntelo: AI solutions for improved customer engagement
Hyntelo, an AI solutions company, specialises in helping pharmaceutical companies leverage data for better customer engagement.
With over 70 employees across its Rome and Pisa offices, Hyntelo has been recognised as one of the first Veeva AI Partners, validating its value as a leading tech provider. Hyntelo’s co-founder and CEO, Giacomo Filippo Porzio, spoke with pharmaphorum about the recognition, as well as the company’s history and offerings, providing services to clients globally, with a focus on the finance and life sciences industries.
Beginnings and development: From start-up to growth stage
Porzio founded Hyntelo (then known as Sixth Sense) with Gianluca Nastasi in 2015. Initially, it was just the two of them and their computers, but the pair soon welcomed entrepreneur Renato Giacobbo Scavo as their mentor. With his addition, the growth of Sixth Sense took off quickly.
“My grandfather was a farmer, my parents are chemists, but they've always been working as freelance entrepreneurs, so that was a career I wanted to have,” Porzio explained. “So, there was a kind of drive that I think was the spark inside, but then what really initiated all of this was when I met Gianluca during my PhD in engineering.”
The duo applied the data analytics and machine learning skills they had honed and used in academia to the business world, helping to solve issues there. What they lacked, however, was knowledge of customer engagement.
“That was where Renato's contribution was instrumental and fundamental,” said Porzio. “He brought the expertise of a serial entrepreneur – he was at the time on his second or third venture, and he saw in us the possibility to help us start a new one.”
In 2018, the company shifted its focus from providing professional services to developing its own proprietary products, such as Lyriko, which launched in 2020.
“We think that data has the power, if you can read [it] appropriately, to drive better business decisions,” said Porzio. “Modelling of behaviour is an example, forecasting is another: based on the data, companies can take decisions that lead to better outcomes. That has always been our North Star. Even when we started to have, in 2020, an MVP of a product that we launched and put to market as Lyriko, we always wanted to keep that soul, the spirit of bringing insights based on the data.”
By 2022, the company had significantly grown, and it was time to update its corporate identity to reflect this evolution. The start-up rebranded itself as Hyntelo, complete with new name and logo. The name Hyntelo is derived from the combination of “hint” and “tell,” representing the company’s mission to uncover hidden hints and traces in data and bring them to light. The name also nods to the word “intelligence” reflecting the knowledge gained from analysing these data hints.
“We went through rebranding because we were entering a growth stage, so we were not a start-up anymore,” Porzio explained. “We also wanted to celebrate the fact that we closed a financing round with three institutional investors that helped us finance the development of Lyriko, bringing it from an MVP to an enterprise-grade software product that today is live with over five clients in over 20 markets globally. We thought that we also needed a fresh name that was more in line with our proposition, our ambitions.”
Lyriko
Lyriko improves customer engagement with AI by leveraging CRM interactions and enriched data. A suite of modules that enables improved customer engagement using artificial intelligence, it enables effective improvement of customer interactions base by providing actionable insights for sales representatives and orchestrating the content journey across all available channels.
“What we have designed and built is a set of features and modules that help clients to optimise and accelerate the content lifecycle and sales performance processes,” Porzio said.
Each Lyriko module covers a specific need of the customer lifecycle. The Lyriko ‘Tagging’ module includes diverse features that help label and optimise multimedia content: automatic video tagging and content summarisation, content translation for localisation in different markets, content assistant and dashboards, and omnichannel content orchestration. The ‘Suggestions’ module is designed to provide sales reps with actionable insights in compliance with the Next Best Action paradigm, assuring a customer-centric approach that enhances marketing and sales journeys. Thanks to the ‘Segmentation’ model, marketing teams can create dynamic target audiences to study their specific needs in detail. And, by leveraging ‘Lyriko MLR Pre-Check’, marketing teams can expedite the approval process for promotional materials.
“We personalise on a one-on-one basis emails that should be sent to clients,” explained Porzio. “When a doctor comes in to register on a portal on a pharma website, he or she gets personalised messages on logging in, the key messages that are suited for either their interests that they have expressed, or messages that the company wants to share with them. [It’s] making sure that we're not spamming doctors on all the channels, but making sure that only the most relevant information reaches out to them through the most affordable channel.”
Veeva AI Partner Program
In addition to this upward trajectory, Hyntelo strengthens its partnership with Veeva Systems, a global leader in cloud computing applied to the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, having been chosen as an AI Partner. It is a prestigious collaboration for Hyntelo, as it is – at the time of interview – the only one in Europe to join the Veeva AI Partner Program to accelerate the use of generative AI (GenAI) in life sciences. The AI Partner Program provides Veeva’s collaborators with access to advanced technologies to develop GenAI solutions, seamlessly integrated with Veeva Vault applications.
“The Veeva acknowledgement of Hyntelo as an AI partner is a key for us,” stated Porzio. “In May this year at the US commercial summit, the Veeva CEO introduced the new AI programme, and Veeva strategically decided to steer away from building AI solutions themselves, but at the same time were opening up the doors to partners to leverage AI to build solutions for customers.”
“It's a key achievement for us because Veeva is the most common CRM system for pharmaceutical companies, and being recognised by such a partner as an AI vendor – it's a great thing for us,” enthused Porzio. “We are a scale-up company, we are quite structured, and we deliver solutions globally, but still, we are a pretty young company, so it's amazing to see how a huge company like Veeva acknowledges the quality of the work a company like Hyntelo is delivering.”
The future horizon
When it comes to GenAI the future seems ever to be speeding round corners, rather than looking to distant temporal horizons. So, where next?
“The generative AI landscape is evolving so quickly that I think it's pretty out of date already,” said Porzio. “I think there are huge opportunities, […] but there are also some threats that we need to be aware of when building solutions. Starting with the opportunities, I think GenAI has made it much easier to deploy AI solutions in production at scale.”
“The threats that are there, the first one is that the run costs of generative AI solutions should be taken into account,” he continued. “The second one is that the technology is evolving so fast that investments should be made, I would say, with a cautious approach. Instead of going all-in to building a solution and scaling it in production based on a single technology stack, I think the smartest approach that we're seeing with our customers is to pilot a solution and then roll it out in a sequential manner.”
“I think the journey with AI has just started. I think the market is huge. We're talking about trillions of dollars globally in terms of the AI market, and so I'm very excited to see what's ahead,” Porzio concluded.
About Hyntelo
Hyntelo, one of the first Veeva AI Partners, empowers Life Sciences businesses to harness data and adopt AI solutions. Our flagship product, Lyriko, enhances customer engagement by optimizing CRM interactions with enriched data and AI. Today, leading pharmaceutical companies such as MSD, Novo Nordisk, Grünenthal and Takeda rely on Lyriko.
About interviewee
Giacomo Filippo Porzio has a PhD in Industrial Engineering from the Sant’Anna University in Pisa. Prior to funding Sixth Sense, Porzio gained a multi-year experience as management consultant in Deloitte Consulting and Mastercard in the design and development of data-driven digital solutions.
