How we helped Ardigen transition from a service-based model to an AI-driven consulting and product model in Biotech

ByAndrzej Przewięźlikowski

3HT Partners’ partnership with Ardigen’s CEO demonstrated how one of Europe’s leading AI-powered CROs can translate years of deep bioinformatics expertise into a trusted advisor for global pharma companies – and how its flagship phenAID platform is becoming a symbol of this shift.

The drug discovery industry is undergoing its most profound transformation in decades. Pharma companies are no longer buying analyst hours or “turnkey machine learning models” – they are seeking partners who can translate phenotypic, multi-omics, and imaging data into concrete decisions about which targets to develop and which to abandon. The value has shifted from engineering to insight.

For companies that have grown out of bioinformatics engineering, this is the moment of truth. Such a moment occurred in 2025 for Ardigen – a Krakow-based AI-powered CRO with offices in San Francisco and Cambridge, serving over 15,000 biotech and pharma clients across over 700,520 projects. The creator of the phenAID platform, which implements end-to-end phenomics data journeys, and is the creator of the phenAID platform.

Ardigen’s CEO posed the question that every mature service company sooner or later faces: if our team delivers billions worth of results to clients, why are we selling them in man-hours? The market saw Ardigen as a great performer. The management knew the company was much more than that.

Working together on a new position

Together with Ardigen’s CEO and management team, we designed a series of strategic workshops during which we didn’t build presentations – we built a shared vision of what the company should be in three years. Over several sessions, we worked on the strategy, market, competitors, product and service portfolio, and – most importantly – phenAID as a product asset that could decouple Ardigen’s growth from a linear labor-hour curve.

From these discussions, a short, operational Value Creation Plan and repositioning strategy emerged: from a provider of advanced IT and bioinformatics services to a trusted consulting partner for biotech – a company that sells decisions and results, not development sprints.

What’s changed?

Ardigen’s management emerged from the project with three things it hadn’t previously had in one place: a coherent strategic narrative ready for discussions with pharma clients and investors; a clear delineation between what we sell as a product (phenAID and related platforms) and what we sell as advanced biotech consulting; and an operational plan for transitioning to this model – step by step, without disrupting ongoing contracts.

For us, this project was a reminder that the most interesting strategic work doesn’t start with benchmarks and slides, but with an honest conversation in the conference room about what kind of business the company really wants to be.

Andrzej Przewięźlikowski is a Senior Partner at 3 Hazel Tree Partners, a boutique advisory firm specializing in transformations in the private equity and IT/TMT sectors in Central and Eastern Europe and the Benelux countries. He has over 20 years of experience as a C-level manager in the enterprise software, loyalty/marketing technology, and financial services IT industries.