Research Grid, the AI startup that helps medical research institutions automate back-office admin for clinical trials, has raised a $6.5m seed round. The company will use the new funding to double down on its mission of making clinical trials faster and more successful.
The round was led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Arve Capital, Ada Ventures, Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab, Arāya Ventures, Ascension Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, and Atomico Angels, with limited availability remaining.
With artificial intelligence poised to rapidly accelerate the speed of drug discovery, the funding comes at a critical time for the clinical trials market, which is now seen as the major bottleneck in the drug development process. This is often caused when using legacy software systems and manual processes to manage trials, resulting in inefficiency, errors, and weak patient engagement. Delays to clinical trials are also phenomenally expensive, costing up to $400 million per year, per trial running to Phase 3, just on back-office admin.
To solve this problem, Research Grid has developed two products, Inclusive and TrialEngine, which together allow its customers to seamlessly manage the full life cycle of clinical trials in one place.
Both products are powered by Research Grid’s patented-pending AI algorithms which automate many of the administrative and data management workflows. This eliminates the monotonous work, freeing up highly qualified medical researchers to focus on more meaningful work.
Research Grid helps its customers cut months off trial timelines while dramatically reducing their costs and driving up success rates. On average, customers of Research Grid see 98% efficiency gains, 45% cost savings, and 145% increase in patient engagement.
The company will use the funding to invest in R&D, developing more AI automations and building out its engineering teams. It also plans to grow its marketing and sales functions as it expands its presence in US and Asian markets.
Products built from first-hand experience
The company was founded by Dr Amber Hill, a former medical researcher with a PhD in biomedical neuroscience and a background in AI research technology. This first-hand experience of the clinical trials means she was uniquely positioned to build a solution, with a deep understanding of the problem.
The recruitment phase is a common source of delays in clinical trials, due to the extremely manual process of sourcing representative samples of patients which are often sourced via adverts on social media. Increased pressure from the FDA to ensure representative patient panels means this has become increasingly important.
Research Grid’s Inclusive product, a patient recruitment and engagement platform, largely solves this problem, providing instant access to a vetted network of more than 91,000 global communities covering 2,050 medical conditions. It also automates all the admin, such as patient outreach, payments, and data management.
The TrialEngine product, which connects seamlessly with Inclusive, handles the administration, data, and reporting workflows during the trial itself. It leverages Research Grid’s AI algorithms to automate tasks such as protocol generation and data extraction.
Dr Amber HIll, Founder and CEO of Research Grid, said:
“I spent 14 years as a medical researcher, and I would spend hundreds of hours copying data from one system to another. The back-office process is completely broken. When you multiply this across the industry the costs for patients and research institutions are astronomical.
“That’s why we’re building the automation engine for admin-free clinical trials. Whether you’re a pharmaceutical company, a CRO, or a clinical research site, we can help run faster, more successful clinical trials. We’ve already seen how AI is accelerating drug discovery and it’s time to do the same in clinical trials.
“We’re delighted to have the support of our investors. Now we’re focusing on expanding our engineering teams and scaling up our R&D efforts, allowing us to deliver more of the features our customers are asking for. We’ll also be growing our sales and marketing team so that we can take advantage of opportunities in the US and Asia.”
Shiv Patel, Partner at Fuel Ventures, said:
“We are committed to backing the most innovative and disruptive businesses in the country, and our investment into Research Grid reinforces this.
“While AI is making significant waves in drug discovery, clinical trials are still the main barrier to medicine reaching the people who need it, and Research Grid is strategically placed to exploit the urgent demand of automating clinical trials at scale. Its rapid growth has shown that the market is largely green-field, with validation from across the industry in the U.S. and Europe, including big pharma, contract research organisations and sites.
“Every investor wants to find unicorns, and with the clinical trial market expected to reach over $95 billion in the next five years, we believe in the mission, proposition and trajectory of Research Grid.”
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