Curebase builds the software that runs clinical research where patients actually live - at home, with their own doctors - instead of inside a hospital three counties away.
Above: the wordmark of a company that decided the waiting room was optional. Photographed against the navy it never seems to leave.
Somewhere right now, a patient is consenting to a drug trial from a kitchen table, tapping through forms on a phone while the coffee goes cold. No clipboard. No two-hour drive. No taking a day off work to sit in a fluorescent waiting room. That tap is logged, time-stamped, and audit-ready - and it lands inside Curebase, the software quietly running the study behind the curtain.
Curebase calls itself an AI-powered eClinical platform that takes a study "from startup to database lock." Translated out of industry dialect: it is the operating system for a clinical trial. Electronic data capture, electronic consent, patient-reported outcomes, recruitment, and a virtual research site - the things that used to be eight vendors and a filing cabinet - live in one place. The company is roughly 55 people, headquartered on Market Street in San Francisco, and it has spent the better part of a decade insisting the trial should bend around the patient, not the other way around.
"We aren't just throwing software over the fence - it's end to end."
The scoreboard, circa the company's own telling. Numbers a clinical-trial vendor is allowed to brag about - and noticeably free of the kind that get you a letter from a regulator.
The clinical trial industry is worth somewhere near $50 billion, and a surprising amount of that money goes to friction. Trials are slow because they are hard to enroll. They are hard to enroll because participation usually means living near an academic medical center and being able to show up there, repeatedly, on a weekday. The result is predictable: trials run behind schedule, costs balloon, and the people who get studied skew toward whoever lives closest to the hospital.
Which is a tidy way of saying that the science of a new medicine can be excellent while the experiment that proves it is built on a 1970s travel itinerary. Curebase's founding observation was unglamorous and correct - the bottleneck isn't always the molecule. Sometimes it's the parking lot.
"The future of clinical testing is decentralized."
A slogan, yes. But also the entire thesis compressed to five words: if patients can't get to the trial, bring the trial to the patients.
Curebase was founded in 2017 by Tom Lemberg, whose resume reads like a tour of every unsexy-but-critical corner of health software: cloud EMRs, precision oncology, clinical trial decision support. He went through Y Combinator in 2018, and in 2022 landed on Forbes' 30 Under 30 for healthcare. The bet he made was simple to state and hard to build: software alone wouldn't fix decentralized trials, because a trial is not just data - it is doctors, consent, oversight, and a regulator who expects every box checked.
So Curebase didn't just ship an app and wish sponsors luck. It built a virtual research site, staffed with trained principal investigators who actually oversee the studies, and added a "bring your own physician" option so a patient could enroll with the doctor they already trust. The unfashionable insight - that you have to own the messy human parts, not just the clean digital ones - is the reason the pitch has aged better than most pandemic-era telehealth promises.
"His career has focused entirely on healthcare and life-science software - the cloud EMR space, precision oncology, and clinical trial decision support."
Tom Lemberg starts Curebase in San Francisco with a decentralized-trials thesis.
Joins the accelerator; early backing from Bold Capital and others.
Led by GGV Capital, with Xfund and Bold Capital. A new approach to clinical trials gets institutional money.
Industry Ventures leads; Gilead Sciences adds a strategic investment. Lemberg makes Forbes 30 Under 30.
Launches an all-in-one software + trial-execution package for digital therapeutics sponsors.
Repositions as an AI-powered eClinical platform spanning study startup to database lock.
Six dots, one trajectory. The kind of timeline that looks inevitable in hindsight and felt like a series of cliffhangers at the time.
The pitch of a unified platform sounds boring until you have lived the alternative - one tool for consent, another for data, a third for surveys, none of them speaking to each other, all of them billable. Curebase folds the stack together so the data captured at a kitchen table and the data captured at a clinic land in the same structured system, ready for the moment every trial points toward: database lock.
Clinical-grade electronic data capture unifying study data across decentralized and hybrid sites.
Remote, 21 CFR Part 11-compliant informed consent - the kitchen-table tap that starts it all.
Patient-reported outcomes and clinical assessments captured by app, between clinic visits.
Tools to find, enroll, and retain participants - including populations trials usually miss.
Trained principal investigators run studies; patients can bring their own physician.
AI-driven patient matching and trial insights layered across the platform.
The toolkit. Each tile replaces a vendor someone used to email a spreadsheet to. Compliance acronyms included at no extra charge.
"One eClinical platform to take you from study startup to database lock."
A thesis is cheap; a trial that finishes on time is not. Curebase's case rests on the studies it has run and the names willing to run them on its software - across pharma, biotech, retail health, and digital therapeutics.
A guest list spanning the corner pharmacy to gene-therapy upstarts - the rare lineup where Walgreens and a biotech you've never heard of share a table.
Sources: TechCrunch, MobiHealthNews, MedCity News, Crunchbase. Seed figure approximate. Series B led by Industry Ventures with a strategic investment from Gilead Sciences.
The bars get taller and the investors get bigger. Note the third bar - that's the one where a $30B pharma company decided to put its name on the cap table.
Strategic investor and collaborator extending DCT and hybrid expertise into interventional studies.
AI-powered patient matching to reach previously untapped patient populations.
Research-and-education partnership helping DTx companies run effective trials.
Global Impact Partner with the Society for Clinical Research Sites.
Here is the part that is easy to say and hard to do. When a trial only enrolls people who can reach a hospital, the data describes those people - and a medicine approved on a narrow slice of humanity gets prescribed to everyone. Curebase's argument is that decentralization isn't just convenient; it's corrective. Run the study around the patient's lifestyle and you widen the aperture: more geographies, more schedules, more kinds of people in the dataset.
The company wraps this in clinical-grade seriousness - SOC 2 Type II, 21 CFR Part 11, GDPR - because a noble mission that fails an audit helps no one. The point isn't speed for its own sake. It's that faster, broader, cleaner trials get working medicine to patients sooner, and to more of them.
"Launch studies faster, capture cleaner data, and boost participant engagement."
Return to the patient with the cold coffee. A decade ago, that person likely never would have heard about the trial, let alone joined it - they lived too far, worked the wrong hours, didn't fit the catchment area of an academic center. The study would have recruited slower, enrolled narrower, and the medicine, if it worked, would have arrived later for everyone.
Now the trial came to them. The consent was a tap, the data was clean, the oversight was real, and a principal investigator they may never meet in person is watching the numbers. Multiply that by 50-plus studies across four countries and you start to see the shape of Curebase's wager: that the next generation of medicine will be proven not in waiting rooms, but at kitchen tables - and that the boring, compliant software making that possible is worth building. The coffee's still cold. The trial, for once, is on time.
"Bring your own physician - join a trial with the doctor you already see."