Building a Value-Driven Platform
SPONSORED CONTENT: As the biopharmaceutical landscape increasingly demands integrated technical operations, GCCs are expanding beyond back-office efficiency, reveals Shashidhar K L from Pivot Path.
Over the past decade, Global Capability Centers (GCCs) have transitioned from cost-arbitrage centers into strategic drivers of technical transformation across the biopharmaceutical sector. By centralizing core functions — ranging from pharmacovigilance and clinical trial management to legacy manufacturing digitization — these platforms enable life sciences organizations to streamline complex global operations.
Following its formal demerger from Arcolab in June 2026, Pivot Path has established itself as an independent, GxP operations and technology firm. In this interview with The Pharma Navigator, Shashidhar K L, Chief Executive Officer of Pivot Path, outlines the organization's trajectory, its core service frameworks, and its expansion strategy across European and North American markets.
Click the video above to view the full interview.
Building and Creating an Impact
TPN: Before we talk about Pivot Path, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey so far?
Shashidhar: My name is Shashidhar, and I am the CEO of Pivot Path. I set up Pivot Path (formerly Arcolab) seven years ago. My professional career has spanned almost two and a half decades with the past two decades focused within the pharmaceutical industry. I've spearheaded businesses in Latin America, run a center of excellence (COE) in Mauritius, and managed manufacturing and commercial operations in Europe. During the past 10 years, I had the privilege of running a medical device startup based out of India, and over the past seven years, I had the opportunity to set up Arcolab, which has now been renamed Pivot Path to reflect how we pivoted into being a capability offering for global pharma.
Overall, I have 20-plus years of experience covering multiple geographies — from Latin America to Africa, Europe, and India. I’ve spent a lot of time in leadership roles running supply chains, manufacturing operations, and managing P&Ls. I spent five years at Aspen Pharmacare, a couple of years at Mylan, and was also part of a company called Strides Pharma, which is a publicly listed and highly reputed pharmaceutical company based out of Bangalore.
Most of my experience has been in building something from scratch, setting up new capability centers, or turning companies around. I always get excited when there's an opportunity to build and create an impact.
A Shared Vision
TPN: Could you go into a bit more detail about Pivot Path and how it came into being?
Shashidhar: In 2019, right before COVID, I was speaking to one of the founders of Strides who had a vision to set up a shared service platform or a shared service model — what is now part of the trend known as GCCs. Back then, there were multiple group entities operating across APIs, oral dosages, biopharmaceuticals, and injectables. While these groups were separate companies, the operational nuances between them all were largely the same. So, the idea was: is there an opportunity to create a centralized platform where all these companies can benefit from resource sharing, efficiency, operational transformation, and knowledge, sharing?
This is how we embarked on setting up a company called Arcolab in 2019. We simply identified the processes and technical functions using a simple two-by-two matrix. Beyond standard run-of-the-mill shared services, such as HR and finance, we targeted technical pharma functions, including central quality operations, clinical operations, and legal services. Anything that could be standardized, optimized, or cross-cut across entities became a candidate for the capability center. We launched on day one with 330 domain experts carved out from our group companies — people with anywhere from 10 to 25 years of pharmaceutical industry experience.
In 2020, when COVID hit, we re-evaluated our direction using an acronym called COSA:
Consolidate: Grouping software licenses (like Microsoft or SAP) and enterprise insurance to negotiate better value.
Optimize: Standardizing processes to create operational single-stream models.
Standardize: Unifying core workflows like onboarding and client engagement.
Automate: Applying technology and automation once processes are standardized.
Unlike cost-arbitrage models that replace high-cost roles with low-cost labor, our focus was strictly value creation. We put people before profits and retained our team through the pandemic.
In 2022, we acquired a Switzerland-based IT firm with an offshore team in Bangalore. We integrated their software development expertise into our deep pharma domain knowledge to build proprietary platforms, IP-based solutions, and AI tools for the industry. Because we kept pivoting every two years — from a back-end organization to a shared service model, to a value-creation platform, and finally to a tech-enabled life sciences consulting firm — we renamed ourselves Pivot Path. In June 2026, we officially demerged from our parent company to operate independently, scaling our services across the global pharmaceutical landscape without conflicts of interest.
Integrated Business Models
TPN: What does Pivot Path actually offer clients?
Shashidhar: Our services can be split into three models: managed services, consulting services, and technology/product offerings. Additionally, we integrate all these models together, meaning that there are really four lines of businesses that we offer to our clients.
So, one line of our business could be classified as clinical operations and pharmacovigilance (PV) services combined with intellectual property consulting. Within this offering we help pharmaceutical companies in devising their clinical operation strategies, BA/BE studies, and protocol management. We also help them with their patents, and we do a full-scale pre-clinical and post-clinical/post-marketing PV services. Furthermore, to assist companies with their process consulting and improvements, we have integrated technology into this pillar, including our proprietary AI platform, NovaVigil, which automates case intake and literature searching.
Then the second component of our business is manufacturing digitization and quality compliance. For this, we target mid-sized and generic pharmaceutical companies that are cost-conscious and looking to digitize legacy infrastructure. We can plug into 30-year-old legacy systems anywhere in the world and turn them fully digital to deliver real-time data analytics and actionable insights. On the compliance side, we offer validation services and an integrated suite covering document management systems (DMS), validation management systems (VMS), training management systems (TMS), and quality management systems (QMS).
The third important component of our offering involves talent acquisition. Leveraging our deep pharma network, we recruit close to 2,000 pharmaceutical professionals annually for our clients, ranging from CXO leadership down to entry-level positions. We also design talent strategies, organizational designs, and workforce restructuring plans aligned with business growth.
Uniquely Positioned
TPN: What truly sets Pivot Path apart from other players in this space?
Shashidhar: Our positioning in the market is something that we keep talking about, and based on our research and assessment, we feel we are very uniquely positioned here. We're trying to bring in domain expertise, technology, and process consulting all under one roof, and I think that's very unique.
If you look at the landscape of the market, you will either find consulting firms working with multiple partners, or you’ll find service firms working with technology partners. There's always this hand-off that takes place, and while they all present it as an integrated solution, it's actually chaos on the back end that always results in lots of inefficiencies.
So, the way we are positioning ourselves here is that with Pivot Path, you have one unified platform encompassing technology, consulting, and managed services. That’s the way we position ourselves.
A lot of customers are hearing us for the first time, because while we have been in the industry for the seven/eight years, we were mostly looking internally at capabilities, which has given us an advantage of building deep capabilities within pharma. Now, when we're talking to customers, they're surprised by the length and breadth of our offerings and how we have kind of integrated our domain technology and knowledge of pharma into our services.
An Open Consulting Firm
TPN: Where is Pivot Path headed from here?
Shashidhar: Our vision is to truly be an open consulting firm, cutting across the Asian market, predominantly in India with additional focus in Europe — because that region is also a pharma innovations marketplace and a lot of generic companies and other companies are located there.
We are setting up our European headquarters in Zug, Switzerland, by the end of this quarter, backed by our nearshore delivery center in Romania. We are hiring a lot of new resources in Europe in addition to spending a lot of time in India. Of course, it is imperative to be in the U.S. market in terms of opportunities, so, that forms the third phase of our plan, which will probably come to fruition around January 2027.
Our positioning is to reach out to all the mid-sized companies, anything in the range of $100 million to $3 to $4 billion kind of companies around the world and between India, Europe, and U.S.
Another part of our growth plans is that we want to bring value and impact to the customer. We want to find that deep collaboration as a model. So, we don't want to do standalone services, you know, project-based or contract-based, we want to be truly a long-term partner. That's the kind of model that we're looking at.
We take our time to assess candidate companies and onboard them across our entire platform as long-term strategic partners. We believe there's significant value in that approach.
Final Thoughts
TPN: Do you have any final thoughts you would like to share?
Shashidhar: The platform and solutions we offer touch every stage of drug development — from clinical research to manufacturing, quality, and post-marketing safety. We want to be that trusted, serious partner driving continuous innovation, operational excellence, and lasting value for both our clients and end patients.
About the Interviewee
Shashidhar KL is the Chief Executive Officer of Pivot Path. A seasoned business leader with over two decades of experience across Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices. Shashidhar has held leadership roles with organizations including Agnus Capital, Mylan (now Viatris), Aspen Pharmacare, and Skanray Devices, delivering strategic initiatives across Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. He holds an MBA from the University of Mysore and has completed the Advanced Management Program from IIM Bangalore.
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