Lindus Health raises $55 million to “fix the broken clinical trial industry.”

A four-year-old London startup is backed Peter Thiel has raised a $55 million Series B round as it sets out to “fix the broken clinical trial industry.”

This announcement comes at a time when artificial intelligence is taking shape revolution in drug discovery and developmentin turn, it has increased the demand for a streamlined clinical trial process to help bring new drugs to market more quickly.

Lindus Health has built a platform that covers the entire process of conducting clinical trials, where automation plays a central role – thus Lindus calls itself the “anti-CRO” (contract research organization). A CROfor the uninitiated, it is an external organization used by pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies to conduct important clinical research, allowing those companies to focus more on their core drug development work.

The CRO market was closed as one 82 trillion dollar market last year and is projected to increase to $130 billion by the end of the decade.

Trials and tests

Although clinical trials vary in size and scope, they typically involve several phases from start to finish, including trial design, as well as establishing a protocol and regulatory submission package. Next, they need to build the technology to manage pathways, recruit patients, and collect data. Overall, it can take years, so when a potentially life-saving drug is on the cards, anything that can speed things up is a good thing.

Lindus says he can use machine learning to make many parts of this process easier, such as creating a labor-intensive initial protocol (a detailed plan). To do this, Lindus built a protocol generation tool trained on historical data that can generate an initial draft.

While its software is a big part of Lindus’ offering, co-founder Mary Beckwith (pictured above with co-founders Michael Young and Nick Haldimann) emphasizes that the company provides everything needed to run a fully completed clinical trial, including the staff needed to run it.

“We have directly enrolled and treated more than 35,000 patients. Our staff includes physicians, physicians, technologists who oversee trial data, clinical operations and regulators,” Beckwith said in an interview with TechCrunch last week.

Founded in 2021, Lindus Health has so far conducted clinical trials in Europe and the US focusing on conditions such as asthma, acne, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, hypertension, weight management and social anxiety. These trials are either for testing drugs or for testing new medical devices.

“What’s common with a lot of what you’re going to see, and what we’re excited about, is that these are pretty complex, widespread conditions that a lot of people suffer from, and frankly, they’ve been neglected by the industry,” Beckwith said.

Drug discovery

The rise of AI is leading to all sorts of things ethical and legal disputesone area that excites many people is its potential applications in healthcare, particularly in healthcare drug discovery.

A bunch startups have raised capital is applied with trucks AI to the drug discovery processand the company at the center of much of it Google’s DeepMind. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper in October received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry For AlphaFold, a deep learning model capable of predicting the 3D structure of proteins—information critical to disease research and assistance scientists discover new drug candidates.

Accountants predicts Thanks to these advances, it was possible to cure all human diseases within ten years. And some of them early signs is positive clinical trials will be key to prove the true value of the technology. As in the drug discovery industry, many startups have been raise venture capital to modernize the dusty old clinical trial industry.

This raises an important question: Does all the hype around AI drug discovery create more demand for clinical trial technology?

Beckwith, for his part, thinks there is a correlation.

“Frankly, all these AI drug discovery companies won’t have the impact they deserve if we don’t overcome this bottleneck in clinical trials,” he said. “The average AI drug discovery company makes targets and hypotheses about that drug or patient population, but you still have to test them.”

For a pure software firm, the concept of rapid testing, iterating and shipping code is pretty well ingrained in the company culture. But even in biotech, where software is central to operations, the mantra of “move fast and break things” was hard to accept.

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 things could be greatly improved with a more efficient clinical trial infrastructure.

“Our mission as a company is to help these biotech companies test and iterate with patients faster and safer,” he said.

‘scratching the surface’

Lindus Health previously raised nearly $25 million in equity and grant funding $18 million in Series A round in 2023 From people like Spotify investor Creandum and billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. With a fresh $55 million in the bank, the company is set 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, move into “more complex” types of clinical trials, and strengthen its integration with third-party tools such as electronic medical records.

Like any company worth 2025, Lindus is exploring more applications for AI in its business, including ways to analyze clinical trial data in real time.

“We’re just scratching the surface of what we can do with artificial intelligence,” Beckwith said.

Lindus Health’s Series B round was led by Balderton Capital with backing from Creandum, Firstminute, Seedcamp and Visionaries.