Research Grid, an AI company that helps medical research institutions automate back-office admin for clinical trials, announced it has raised a $6.5 million seed round. The company will use this new funding round to double down on its mission of making clinical trials faster and more successful.
This funding 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. Limited availability remains.
With AI rapidly accelerating the speed of drug discovery, the funding comes at a crucial time for the clinical trials market, which is now seen as the major bottleneck in the drug development process. And this is often caused when using legacy software systems and manual processes to manage trials, resulting in inefficiency, errors, and weak patient engagement. The delays to clinical trials are also costly, costing up to hundreds of millions 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 allow its customers to seamlessly manage the full life cycle of clinical trials in one place.
These products are powered by Research Grid’s patented-pending AI algorithms, which automate many administrative and data management workflows. This eliminates monotonous work, freeing up highly qualified medical researchers to focus on more meaningful work.
Research Grid helps customers cut months off trial timelines while dramatically reducing their costs and driving up success rates. On average, Research Grid customers see 98% efficiency gains, 45% cost savings, and 145% increase in patient engagement.
The company will use this funding round to invest in R&D, develop more AI automation, and build out its engineering teams. It also plans to grow its marketing and sales functions as it expands its presence in the US and Asian markets.
Dr. Amber Hill, a former medical researcher with a PhD in biomedical neuroscience and a background in AI research technology, launched the company. Her first-hand experience of the clinical trials means she was uniquely positioned to build a solution and had a deep understanding of the problem.
This recruitment phase is a common source of delays in clinical trials due to the highly manual process of sourcing representative samples of patients, often sourced via social media adverts. Increased pressure from the FDA to ensure representative patient panels has made this increasingly important.
Research Grid’s Inclusive product, a patient recruitment and engagement platform, largely addresses this problem. It offers instant access to a vetted network of over 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 connects seamlessly with Inclusive and handles the administration, data, and reporting workflows during the trial itself. It utilizes Research Grid’s AI algorithms to automate tasks such as protocol generation and data extraction.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
- Dr. Amber HIll, Founder and CEO of Research Grid
“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 organizations 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.”
- Shiv Patel, Partner at Fuel Ventures
