Faro AI has raised $37.3 million in Series B funding to expand its agentic AI platform for clinical development, as pharmaceutical companies increasingly turn to artificial intelligence to improve clinical trial design and execution. Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and S32 co-led the financing. Existing investors General Catalyst, Northpond Ventures, Polaris Partners, PTX Capital and Zetta also participated, alongside new investor Ankona Capital.
The Series B gives Faro additional capital to expand its technology across more stages of the drug development process and deepen adoption among pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Faro is developing structured clinical data models designed to allow AI systems to reason across scientific, medical, regulatory and operational information rather than relying solely on unstructured text documents.
That distinction is particularly important in clinical development, where decisions are often based on information distributed across trial protocols, patient populations, regulatory requirements, historical study results and operational data.
Rather than treating each document or data source independently, Faro is building infrastructure intended to give AI systems a more structured understanding of the relationships between those elements.
The company is using that foundation to develop AI agents that can support workflows involved in moving medicines from first-in-human studies through regulatory approval.
Clinical development can involve years of work and substantial financial investment, making improvements in trial design, planning and execution potentially meaningful for drug developers.
AI systems capable of analyzing structured clinical information could help teams identify inconsistencies, evaluate design choices and reduce some of the manual work associated with developing and managing trials.
Faro’s platform is now used by six of the world’s 10 largest pharmaceutical companies, indicating significant adoption among large drug developers.
That customer base provides the company with exposure to complex clinical development environments where teams may be managing numerous programs across therapeutic areas and stages of development.
Large pharmaceutical companies also operate under strict regulatory and documentation requirements, increasing the importance of AI systems that can work with structured information and support repeatable processes.
Faro’s approach reflects a broader shift in healthcare AI from tools focused primarily on summarization or content generation toward systems capable of completing multi-step workflows.
Agentic AI platforms are designed to move beyond answering individual questions by helping users carry out more complex tasks and coordinating information across multiple stages of a process.
Within clinical development, those capabilities could potentially be applied to protocol design, study planning, regulatory preparation and operational decision-making.
The company plans to use the Series B funding to expand the number and capabilities of AI agents available through its platform.
That expansion is intended to cover more of the clinical development lifecycle, beginning with early human studies and extending through later-stage trials and regulatory approval.
The financing could also support continued development of Faro’s underlying clinical data infrastructure, which provides the structured information required for its agents to reason across complex development programs.
The involvement of Merck Global Health Innovation Fund also adds a strategic healthcare investor with direct exposure to the pharmaceutical industry.
Combined with participation from healthcare, technology and venture investors, the round gives Faro a broader group of backers as it scales its platform.
As drug developers face pressure to reduce development timelines and improve the productivity of research spending, tools that can make clinical processes more efficient are attracting increasing attention.
Clinical trials remain one of the most expensive and time-consuming stages of bringing new medicines to market, and delays or design issues can create significant costs.
Faro is positioning its platform around the idea that structured data and AI agents can help teams make better-informed decisions earlier in that process.
With $37.3 million of new Series B capital and adoption across six of the world’s 10 largest pharmaceutical companies, Faro plans to accelerate development of its agentic AI capabilities and expand the role its platform plays across the clinical development lifecycle.
KEY QUOTE:
“Our customers want to use AI agents not simply to generate content, but to understand development intent, reason across these processes, and automate more of the work required to move a program forward.”
Scott Chetham, Co-Founder And CEO Of Faro AI
