Lindos Health raises $55 million to ‘fix broken clinical trials industry’
A four-year-old London startup backed by… Peter Thiel It has raised a $55 million Series B round as it seeks to “fix the broken clinical trials industry.”
This announcement comes at a time when artificial intelligence is taking shape A revolution in drug discovery and developmentwhich in turn stimulates demand for a streamlined clinical trial process to help get new drugs to market faster.
Lindos Health Lindos has built a platform that covers the entire process of conducting clinical trials, with automation playing a central role – as such, Lindos calls itself an “anti-CRO” (contract research organisation). A CrowFor the uninitiated, it is an external organization used by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies to conduct important clinical research, which enables those companies to focus more on their core business of drug development.
The CRO market has been pegged as A market worth $82 billion last year, and is expected to grow to $130 billion by the end of the decade.
Trials and tribulations
While clinical trials vary in size and scope, they typically involve several phases from start to finish, which include trial design as well as building a protocol and regulatory submission package. Next, they must set up the technology to run pathways, recruit patients, and collect data. In all, this can take years, so when there is a potentially life-saving drug, anything that can speed things up is a good thing.
Lindos says she can simplify many parts of this process using machine learning, for example to design the initial protocol (a detailed plan), which can be very labor-intensive. For this reason, Lindos has built a protocol generation tool trained on historical data that can generate a rough draft.
While its software is a large part of Lindos’ offerings, he is one of its founders Merry Beckwith (Pictured above right with co-founders Michael Young and Nick Haldeman) stresses that the company provides everything needed to run a full, comprehensive clinical trial, including the personnel needed to conduct it.
“We are live enrolling and providing treatment to over 35,000 patients now. On staff we have clinicians, clinicians, technologists who oversee trial data, clinical operations, and regulatory people,” Beckwith told TechCrunch in an interview last week.
Founded in 2021, Lindus Health has so far conducted clinical trials across Europe and the US, focusing on conditions such as asthma, acne, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, high blood pressure, weight management and social anxiety. These experiments are either to try drugs or to test new medical devices.
“What you might notice is common with a lot of these things, and what we’re excited about, is that these are very complex, prevalent conditions that a lot of people suffer from, and frankly, they’ve been neglected by the industry,” Beckwith said.
Drug discovery
While the rise of artificial intelligence leads to all kinds of… Moral and Legal dilemmasOne area that seems to interest a lot of people is its potential applications in healthcare, especially in… Drug discovery.
A large number of It sparked startups Truckloads of capital to apply Artificial intelligence for the drug discovery processAnd the company is at the heart of a lot of this Google DeepMind. Back in October, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry For AlphaFold, a deep learning model capable of predicting the 3D structure of proteins – important data for disease research and assistance Scientists have discovered new drug candidates.
Hassabis He predicts All human diseases could be cured within a decade thanks to these advances. While some Early indicators positive, Clinical trials will be pivotal To prove the true value of technology. As is the case with the drug discovery industry, Many startups It’s done to lift Venture capital To modernize the dusty old clinical trials industry.
This raises an important question: Will all the hype around AI drug discovery lead to increased demand for clinical trial technology?
For his part, Beckwith believes there is a connection.
“Frankly, not all AI drug discovery companies will have the impact they deserve unless we fix this bottleneck in clinical trials,” he said. “The average AI drug discovery company comes up with targets and hypotheses about that drug, or patient population, but you still have to test them.”
For a pure software company, the concept of rapidly testing, iterating, and shipping code is well ingrained in the company culture. But in biotechnology, even when software is a key component of operations, it has been difficult to embrace the “move fast and break things” mantra.
This is for good reason, of course, as there is a big difference between building a market for fashion and developing life-saving medicines. However, Beckwith says things could be greatly improved with a more efficient clinical trial infrastructure.
“Our mission as a company is to help biotech companies test and iterate more quickly and safely with patients,” he said.
“scratch the surface”
Lindus Health had previously raised approximately $25 million in equity and grant funding, including… Series A round of $18 million in 2023 From the likes of Spotify investor Creandum and billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. With a new $55 million in the bank, the company is preparing to accelerate its expansion, which includes moving its global headquarters from the UK to the US – a transition currently underway.
Furthermore, Lindos plans to invest more resources in its go-to-market commercial team, expand into “more complex” clinical trial types, and enhance integrations with third-party tools such as electronic medical records.
As with any company worth paying attention to in 2025, Lindos is also exploring more AI applications across its business, including ways to analyze clinical trial data in real time.
“We’re still at the beginning of what we can do with AI,” Beckwith said.
Balderton Capital led Lindus Health’s Series B round, with support from Creandum, Firstminit, Seedcamp, and Visionaries.
