A four-year-old London startup backed by Peter Thiel has raised $55 million in a Series B round to begin “fixing the broken clinical trials industry.”
The announcement comes as artificial intelligence revolutionizes drug discovery and development, increasing demand for streamlined clinical trial processes that help bring new drugs to market faster.
Lindas Health has built a platform that spans the entire end-to-end process of conducting clinical trials, with automation playing a central role. That’s why Lindas calls itself the “anti-CRO” (contract research organization). A CRO is an external organization used by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies to conduct important clinical research, allowing these companies to focus more on their core drug development activities. It will be.
The CRO market was estimated to be a $82 billion market last year and is expected to grow to $130 billion by the end of 2020.
trials and tribulations
Clinical trials vary in size and scope, but typically involve several stages from start to finish, including not only the trial design but also the construction of the protocol and regulatory submission package. . You then need to set up the technology to run the trial, recruit patients, and collect data. This can take years, so anything that can speed things up is a good thing when potentially life-saving drugs are available.
Lindas says many parts of this process can be streamlined using machine learning. For example, designing initial protocols (detailed plans), which can be very labor intensive. For this reason, Lindas has built a protocol generation tool trained on historical data that can create an initial draft.
While the company’s software makes up the bulk of Lindus’ products, co-founder Meri Beckwith (pictured above, right, with co-founders Michael Young and Nick Haldiman) has The company emphasizes that it provides everything needed to conduct end-to-end clinical trials. , including the staff necessary to implement it.
“We currently directly enroll and provide care to more than 35,000 patients. Our staff includes physicians, physicians, and technicians who oversee trial data, clinical operations, and regulatory personnel.” Beck Wiz said in an interview with TechCrunch last week.
Founded in 2021, Lindas Health has previously conducted clinical trials in Europe and the United States focusing on diseases such as asthma, acne, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, hypertension, weight management, and social anxiety. These trials are aimed at testing pharmaceutical products or testing new medical devices.
“You may notice that many of these symptoms have something in common, but what excites us is that these are very complex, common symptoms that many people suffer from, and candidly “It’s been ignored by the industry,” Beckwith said.
drug discovery
The rise of AI is raising all sorts of ethical and legal difficulties, but one area that seems to have many people excited is its potential applications in healthcare, particularly drug discovery .
Many startups are raising truckloads of funding to apply AI to the drug discovery process, and Google’s DeepMind is at the center of many of them. Back in October, DeepMind CEOs Demis Hassabis and John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, a deep learning model that can predict the 3D structure of proteins. This data is important for disease research and helps scientists discover new drug candidates.
Thanks to these advances, Hassabis predicts that all human diseases could be cured within 10 years. Although some early signs are positive, clinical trials will be critical to proving the true value of this technology. Similar to the drug discovery industry, many startups are raising venture capital to modernize the dusty, outdated clinical trial industry.
This raises an important question. Is all the fuss surrounding AI drug discovery leading to increased demand for clinical trial technology?
Beckwith believes there is a correlation.
“Frankly, all these AI drug discovery companies aren’t going to be able to have the impact they deserve unless we solve this bottleneck in clinical trials,” he said. “The average AI drug discovery company spits out a target or a hypothesis about this drug or its patient population, but it still needs to be tested.”
For pure software companies, the concept of rapidly testing, iterating, and shipping code is pretty ingrained in the company culture. But in biotechnology, it has been difficult to adopt such a “move fast and break things” mantra, even when software is central to operations.
Of course, there are good reasons for this. Because there’s a world of difference between building a fashion market and developing a medicine that saves lives. But Beckwith says the situation can be greatly improved with a more efficient clinical trial infrastructure.
“Our mission as a company is to help these biotech companies test and replicate in patients faster and more safely,” he said.
“Scratch the surface”
Lindas Health has raised about $25 million in equity and grants to date, including a Series A round in 2023 from Spotify investor Creandum and billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Includes $18 million. With $55 million in new cash in the bank, the company is preparing to accelerate its expansion, including moving its global headquarters from the UK to the US, a move currently underway.
In addition, Lindas plans to invest more resources in its commercial go-to-market team, expand into “more complex” clinical trial types, and strengthen integration with third-party tools such as electronic medical records.
Like most companies worth 2025, Lindas is also exploring further applications of AI across its business, including ways to analyze clinical trial data in real time.
“We’ve just scratched the surface of what AI can do,” Beckwith says.
Lindus Health’s Series B round was led by Balderton Capital and supported by Creandum, Firstmination, Seedcamp, and Visionaries Club.