A four-year-old London startup backed by Peter Thiel has raised a $55 million Series B round as it sets out to “fix the broken clinical trial industry.” The announcement comes as artificial intelligence has revolutionized drug discovery and development, and has fueled calls for a faster clinical trial process to help bring new drugs to market faster. Lindus Health has built a platform that covers the entire end-to-end process of running clinical trials, with automation playing a key role – as such, Lindus calls itself the “anti-CRO” (contract research organization). A CRO, for those who don’t know, is an external organization used by pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies to conduct important clinical research, which allows the company to focus more on core drug development work. The CRO market was estimated to be an $82 billion market last year, and is predicted to grow to $130 billion by the end of the decade. Trials and tribulations While clinical trials vary in size and scope, they usually involve several stages from start to finish, which include planning the trial as well as building protocols and regulatory submission packages. After that, they need to set up the technology to run the pathway, recruit patients, and collect data. Overall, this can take years, so if a life-saving drug is on the cards, anything that can speed it up is good. Lindus says it is possible to streamline many parts of this process using machine learning, for example to design the initial protocol (detailed plan), which can be labor intensive. For this, Lindus has created a protocol generation tool trained on historical data that can create a preliminary draft. While software is a big part of Lindus’ offering, co-founder Meri Beckwith (pictured above right with co-founders Michael Young and Nik Haldimann) insists the company delivers everything it needs to run a full clinical trial. , including the staff needed to do so. “We have directly enrolled and provided care to more than 35,000 patients today. On staff, we have medics, doctors, technologists who monitor trial data, clinical operations and people who manage,” Beckwith told TechCrunch in an interview last week. Lindus Health platform in action Image Credit: Lindus Health Founded in 2021, Lindus Health has so far delivered clinical trials across Europe and the US, focusing on conditions such as asthma, acne, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, hypertension, weight management and social anxiety. . These trials are for testing drugs or testing new medical devices. “Can you notice the commonality with many of these, and what makes us happy, is that this is quite complex, a common condition that many people suffer from, and frankly, they have been neglected by the industry,” Beckwith. said. Drug Discovery While the rise of AI raises all sorts of ethical and legal issues, one area that seems to excite many is its potential applications in healthcare, particularly in drug discovery. Many startups have raised truckloads of capital to apply AI to the drug discovery process, and the company with the most is Google’s DeepMind. Back in October, DeepMind CEO 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 – data that is important for disease research and helps scientists find novel drug candidates. Hassabis predicted that all human diseases could be cured within a decade thanks to these advances. While some early indications are positive, clinical trials will be important to prove the value of the technology. Like the drug discovery industry, many startups are raising venture capital to modernize the dusty old clinical trial industry. This raises an important question: Does all the hullabaloo around AI drug discovery lead to greater demand for clinical trial technology? Beckwith, for his part, thinks there is a correlation. “Honestly, all these AI drug discovery companies won’t have the impact they deserve unless we fix this bottleneck in clinical trials,” he said. “The average AI drug discovery company comes up with a target and a hypothesis about this drug, or that patient population, but you still have to test it.” For a pure software company, the concept of rapid testing, iteration and shipping code is well established in the company culture. But in biotech, even when software is central to operations, it’s hard to apply the “move fast and break things” mantra. This is for good reason, of course, because there is a world of difference between building a fashion market and developing life-saving drugs. However, Beckwith says that could be improved with a more efficient clinical trial infrastructure. “Our mission as a company is to help these biotech companies test and iterate faster, and safer with patients,” he said. ‘Scratching the surface’ Lindus Health has previously raised around $25 million in equity and grant funding, including an $18 million Series A round in 2023 from Spotify investor Creandum and billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. With a new $55 million in the bank, the company is ready to accelerate its expansion, which includes moving its global headquarters from the UK to the US – a transition that is currently underway. In addition, Lindus plans to invest more resources in its commercial go-to-market team, expand the types of “more complex” clinical trials, and improve integration with third-party tools such as electronic medical records. Like any company in 2025, Lindus is also exploring more AI applications in its business, including ways to analyze clinical trial data in real time. “We are just scratching the surface of what we can do with AI,” Beckwith said. Lindus Health’s Series B round was led by Balderton Capital, with support from Creandum, Firstminute, Seedcamp, and Visionaries.
