Leadership

The people behind Forge DC.

Decades of hands-on experience across pharma data strategy, commercial analytics, and omnichannel transformation: a team that has built, governed, and scaled the data foundations that global life-sciences companies run on.

Tom Botting

Co-founder | Delivery Lead

Tom Botting

Tom helps pharma organisations turn fragmented data into structured, usable foundations for AI, customer engagement, and smarter decision-making. He connects siloed systems, improves data quality, and builds the contextual memory that helps LLMs and AI agents deliver reliable, useful outputs, grounded in a background spanning pharma marketing, customer engagement, and operational transformation.

  • Led the design, implementation, and governance of a Precision Taxonomy for a top-10 life-sciences company, enabling consistent content categorisation and sharper reporting across first- and third-party channels.
  • Product Owner for a customer data platform build and customer data strategy, cutting campaign configuration lead time by weeks and enabling near-real-time triggers across rep, web, and email journeys.
  • Directed audience strategy and data enablement in Salesforce Data Cloud for a global pharmaceutical company, evolving market-level use cases into scalable, data-driven engagement models.
  • Delivered a global content taxonomy and AI-assisted automated tagging solution covering 45 fields across 7 domains, with confidence-scored, auditable classification.

Happiest when a fragmented mess of spreadsheets finally becomes a system that marketing teams actually enjoy using.

Toon De Baere

Co-founder | Client Lead

Toon De Baere

Toon has spent more than 15 years driving digital transformation in pharma and health, aligning business strategy with operating models to optimise customer engagement. He has led large-scale change programmes and built scalable solutions that deliver measurable value, and co-founded Forge DC to rethink how life-sciences companies engage with their customers.

  • Established and led the team that shifted a leading pharma organisation’s customer engagement model from product-focused to customer-centric across Europe and Canada.
  • Designed an enterprise-wide omnichannel blueprint integrating strategy, technology, data infrastructure, and marketing operations, rolled out across every functional team.
  • Built in-market marketing operations teams across six European markets, delivering a 70% cost reduction and 3× faster speed to market.
  • Currently leading the roll-out of an internalised creative services model at a top-10 life-sciences company.

Fifteen years of transformation programmes have left him convinced that people, not platforms, decide whether change sticks.

Alex Valassopoulos

Principal | Commercial Excellence Lead

Alex Valassopoulos

Alex is a Commercial Excellence leader with 20 years in pharma analytics, data strategy, and performance management. He led the global commercial data function at a top-10 pharmaceutical company for over nine years, harmonising secondary market data, metric governance, and enterprise reporting across global markets, and brings a deep operational understanding of how product master data, market definitions, and brand performance metrics flow between local markets, central stewards, and global brand teams.

  • Led global commercial reporting and data excellence across all regions and brands, with a substantial budget and a large global team, governing metric definitions, commercial data standards, and target setting.
  • Directed the harmonisation of secondary market data, business rules, and data procurement across dozens of markets, rationalising significant cross-vendor spend and delivering substantial cumulative savings.
  • Deployed a next-generation unified Data & Analytics platform and performance-management tools across global and key markets.
  • Built the commercial execution measurement framework for a global cardiovascular, renal, and metabolism franchise, spanning segmentation, targeting, and investment forecasting.

After nine years running global commercial data, he can spot a broken metric definition from across the boardroom.

Fabio Barboza

Partner | Technical Lead

Fabio Barboza

Fabio helps global companies simplify the complex workflows behind cross-functional business operations, with customised data strategies and automation that merge strategic insight with hands-on technical skill. He designs the scalable taxonomies that power omnichannel operations and modular content, and his grounding in analytics helps brands make informed decisions and personalise at scale. Before pharma, he built data foundations for consumer brands including Kia, Nike, Ralph Lauren, and ASOS.

  • Architect of DataBridge, Forge DC’s commercial intelligence platform: multi-tenant by design, built on a canonical pharma data model, and deployable inside a client’s own cloud environment.
  • Built a production-ready AI content classification system for a global pharmaceutical company: a generative-AI vision pipeline tagging content against a 50+ field harmonised taxonomy, achieving 90%+ confidence on core metadata.
  • Led an end-to-end omnichannel activation strategy for a top-10 life-sciences company, spanning modular content data strategy, an MLR-aligned taxonomy, and DAM integration, aligning 11 global functions and piloting in two core markets.
  • Designed a unified paid-media data strategy and global taxonomy for a global car manufacturer, bringing dozens of agencies into a single tracking and reporting system with ML-driven insights.

Sees every cross-functional process as a communication flow: it breaks where one function hands information to the next, data strategy builds the bridge, and automation ensures scalability and efficiency.

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