Bask
Gill

A broken website and a father's diagnosis

In 2021, Bask Gill's father sustained a vertebral fracture doing ordinary chores. The diagnosis that followed - multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer - sent Bask onto clinicaltrials.gov, the government's official registry for medical research. He had a science background. He knew how to look things up. It still took him months to make sense of the options, and when he finally identified a promising trial, his father's prior treatment had already disqualified him.

That gap between what exists and what's findable - between the science that's happening and the patients who need it - is where Bask planted Power.

He wasn't the only one. His eventual co-founder Brandon Li had watched a close friend navigate a brain tumor diagnosis through the same impenetrable maze. The two had crossed paths at Stanford. They shared a specific frustration and a particular skill set. In May 2021, they incorporated Power.

What they built wasn't a directory. Power is a matching engine - a two-sided marketplace where patients find trials that fit their exact situation, and researchers find patients who might actually qualify. The problem isn't that the research doesn't exist. It's that nobody built the plumbing between it and the people who need it.

Power's numbers tell the story of a market that was invisible, not absent. The platform now lists more than 31,000 active trials across 50,000+ cities. Its network of researchers has crossed 100,000. Study team participation has been growing at roughly 20% month-over-month.

Diversity in trials isn't a values statement. It's an engineering problem.

Clinical research has long skewed toward patients who are white, educated, and connected to academic medical centers. The result isn't just inequity - it's bad science. Drugs get approved based on data from populations that don't represent most of the people who will eventually take them.

Bask and Brandon built Power's matching logic with this in mind. The 40% non-white patient enrollment figure isn't incidental. It reflects deliberate choices about where to place the product, how to describe trials to patients who have historical reasons to distrust research, and how to reduce every unnecessary point of friction in the enrollment funnel.

Power approaches this as a product problem, not a PR problem. If 90% of patients on the platform had zero prior connection to research sites, the bottleneck wasn't awareness - it was access architecture. Nobody had built a patient-first interface for a system designed by researchers, for researchers.

That's the gap Bask filled. And the $19M raised from Footwork, CRV, Kin Ventures, and Contrary suggests the market agrees it needed filling.