The Aidrian origin story
Built from 15 years of selling into pharma
Aidrian is the culmination of more than 15 years of selling into pharma, a series of lessons learned along the way, and more than two years building Athena BDA around those lessons.
There were a handful of moments in my sales career that fundamentally changed how I approached business development.
Each one eventually found its way into Athena.
The sales lessons that shaped Athena BDA, and the connected intelligence that made Aidrian possible.
- Sep 2015Lesson onePersonalise around the brand
- Feb 2017Lesson twoWhen relationship meets product fit
- Sep 2021Lesson threeFollow the launches
- 2023Lesson fourConferences create relationships
- 2024–2026The buildThe connected intelligence hub
- TodayMeet AidrianAI business development assistant
Part one
The lessons that shaped Athena BDA
Personalise around the brand
One of the most successful campaigns I ever ran focused entirely on diabetes. Rather than sending details on everything our company could do, we focused on our deep diabetes experience and how that expertise could help solve the specific challenges facing their brand. It worked and changed my approach to campaigns from that day forward.
Pharma teams care deeply about the world their brand operates in, and the challenges of supporting someone with diabetes are completely different from those of end-of-life oncology care. If your outreach doesn’t reflect that context, you’re likely to end up in the bin alongside the other hundred generic emails someone receives.
When relationship meets product fit
My first multimillion-dollar deal came after nearly four years of staying close to the same senior stakeholder. The breakthrough came when he changed roles, moving into a new franchise with a brand that had an immediate need for our specific product.
A great relationship on its own rarely closes a deal, and strong product fit goes nowhere without access to the decision-maker. The real opportunity opens up when the relationship and the commercial need line up at exactly the same time.
Follow the launches
A few years later, we won work with a self-injectable rare disease therapy approaching approval. That win highlighted an essential lesson: launch brands offer one of the best windows of opportunity in pharma, with new budgets forming, teams growing, and supplier relationships not yet entrenched.
That insight drove the development of Athena's pipeline intelligence. But simply knowing a drug had progressed is not enough; you have to do the difficult work of mapping people to those launch brands.
Conferences create relationships
In 2023, I was part of a team that set up around 75 meetings at conferences. For building completely new relationships, conferences were consistently one of the best environments I had found. People are already there to network, their diaries are open, and there is a natural reason to start a conversation.
But the research was exhausting: figuring out which events to attend, who was attending, and finding their contact details. That frustration led directly to the Athena Conference Module.
Athena BDA begins
By this point, one fundamental problem had become obvious: existing B2B contact databases simply were not built for people selling into pharma. They gave you a name, a company and an email address, but zero pharma-specific context, and building and maintaining that internally requires a huge amount of resource.
So I set out to build a contact database specifically for companies selling into pharma. Athena launched initially through an integration with Apollo to get the underlying data into users' hands quickly.
The Athena BDA intelligence hub
In September 2025, we launched the Athena Intelligence Hub, bringing together multiple pharma intelligence layers inside our own platform for the first time. Users could now track key drug data, pipeline news, upcoming conferences and commercial intent signals in one place.
Athena was becoming a truly connected pharma sales intelligence system. But while the intelligence lived together, contact data still sat externally in Apollo, requiring users to switch between tools to reach stakeholders.
The Contact Portal
In March 2026, the launch of our own Contact Portal removed the final reliance on third-party platforms for accessing Athena contact data. Contacts, drugs, conferences and signals could now sit together inside the same native ecosystem.
Users could move directly from a drug catalyst to the people working on that brand, with lead scoring and brand context built right into the interface. We finally had the connected dataset I had wished existed throughout my sales career.
Great data still requires someone to find the opportunity
Even with all of this intelligence available, a salesperson still had to search through it, configure filters, check updates and connect different signals. They still had to decide what mattered, research the individual, work out why they should contact them and write the outreach.
The quality of the data had improved enormously, but turning insight into action was still super time-intensive. And that is where Aidrian comes in.
The next chapter
Meet Aidrian, your Pharma BD assistant
Athena provides connected, continuously updated data. Aidrian helps you spot hidden leads and act on them faster.
Set Context
Train Aidrian on your company and user context: your target role types, therapy areas, remits and priority companies.
Ask Aidrian
Ask a natural-language question in Claude or ChatGPT. Aidrian searches Athena BDA's connected contact, brand, drug, conference and signal data, then returns a focused answer you can use.
Radar Briefing
A short, prioritised view of what has changed since you last looked: connections who moved, upcoming conferences, pipeline catalysts and new contacts relevant to your context.
Outreach
Aidrian does the outreach research. You humanise the approach.