Inato Secures $20 Million To Enable Access To Inclusive Clinical Trials

By Dan Anderson • Mar 31, 2023
  • Inato is a company that announced it closed $20 million in Series A2 funding.

Inato – a leading technology platform enabling access to inclusive clinical trials – announced the closing of $20 million in Series A2 funding from existing and new investors. This funding includes return and lead investor Cathay Innovation, return investor Obvious Ventures, and new investors La Maison and Top Harvest Capital.

The new funding round will fuel Inato’s continued product innovation, international growth, and hiring of top talent. And Inato will advance the company’s diverse product offering to enable sponsors to strategically meet their diversity goals based on new FDA requirements. Plus the company will also invest in oncology-specific innovation to increase access to care where despite the number of oncology studies increasing at nearly twice the pace of any other therapeutic area, enrollment rates remain startlingly low. Plus Inato will also further define and scale its data model to continue to improving matching reliability between community sites and sponsor trials.

Data has shown that 70% of clinical research happens at the same 5% of sites and only 5% of patients participate in a clinical trial. And this lack of patient access causes trial delays and costs to skyrocket, thus constraining medical innovation and patient diversity. But only 4% of clinical trials in recent years have used a representative population, impacting a drug’s efficacy and safety.

Launched in late 2020, Inato’s platform has quickly become a trusted two-sided platform with over 2,500 community research sites that support more than 70 disease areas in more than 60 countries. And Inato has formed partnerships with a third of the top 30 pharmaceutical companies to make their medical research more accessible, inclusive, and efficient.

KEY QUOTES:

“At Inato we are reversing this trend by flipping the model and empowering research-experienced community sites to access the right trials for their team and local populations — regardless of who they are or where they live. This also enables sponsors to partner with a broader range of verified community research sites, decreasing competition, accelerating site activation, and increasing patient access.”

— Inato Co-Founder and CEO Kourosh Davarpanah

“Our repeat investment in Inato represents our strong conviction in the company’s mission, team, and continued success as an emerging leader and pioneer when it comes to changing the status quo in clinical trial diversity and access. At Cathay, we strongly believe in supporting the emergence of global leaders in digital health, and Inato is a bright example through its adoption by hospitals in 60 countries and pharmaceutical groups from all regions. Inato also reflects the strength of the Cathay ecosystem with its strong collaboration with our strategic partner Sanofi.”

— Jean-François Cochy, partner at Cathay Innovation

“At Obvious, we support entrepreneurs solving humanity’s biggest challenges — and Inato is doing just that. Inato is playing a critical role in enabling clinical research to keep pace with patient diversity and inclusion, along with being really technologically innovative.”

— Rohan Ganesh, partner at Obvious Ventures