Del Smith has an unusual way of talking about trust: he treats it like infrastructure. Not sentiment, not a slogan pinned to an office wall, but a working asset with maintenance costs, accumulated value, and consequences when neglected. That idea sits underneath Acclinate, the Birmingham company he co-founded with Tiffany Whitlow. Its job is to help clinical-research teams include communities that the industry has too often failed to reach. Its method begins well before a study needs names on a roster.
The ordering is Smith's point. Acclinate educates and engages communities through NOWINCLUDED, a platform designed for ongoing conversation and culturally relevant information. Its e-DICT technology gives research sponsors predictive insights for planning, outreach, and enrollment. One side listens and builds relationships. The other organizes the resulting signal. The model refuses the convenient fantasy that a clever algorithm can repair years of institutional distance before lunch.
“There's no amount of technology that's going to instantly increase a person's level of trust,” Smith has said. Coming from a founder whose company uses predictive technology, the line carries useful tension. He is not selling an escape from human work. He is selling a way to make that work sustained, visible, and useful at scale.
A résumé with several lives
Smith arrived at this thesis by a route that looks less like a ladder than a well-organized drawer of adapters. He worked in network communications at McKesson. He helped lead an information-technology business. He founded technology companies. Then he earned three business degrees in Alabama, finishing a doctorate in management at the University of Alabama in 2007.
Academia followed. At Rochester Institute of Technology, he taught management and directed the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship. His research examined minority-owned firms, social capital, and growth. Those subjects sound scholarly on a CV, and they are. They also ask practical founder questions: Who has access to useful networks? How does a relationship become an economic advantage? What happens when talent sits outside the usual channels?
Five rooms, one operating education
Smith then stepped into city government as Rochester's Commissioner of Neighborhood and Business Development. In 2015, he moved to Alabama A&M University as dean of the College of Business & Public Affairs, later adding responsibility for economic development. By then he had been a technologist, entrepreneur, researcher, public official, professor, and administrator. Each role offered a different view of institutions: the code they run, the incentives they follow, the people they overlook, and the ceremonial meetings they schedule while hoping the coffee will provide a strategy.
He jokes that he is a “recovering business-school dean.” The phrase is funny because the recovery appears incomplete. Acclinate is full of a dean's habits: define the system, measure the outcome, build a coalition, and remember that every spreadsheet eventually describes people.
“Trust is at the heart of everything we do.”Del Smith
The company before the conversion
Smith and Whitlow co-founded Acclinate in Alabama in 2019, then sharpened its current model in early 2020. Their complementary perspectives became part of the design. The company would not arrive in a community shortly before an enrollment deadline, extract attention, and vanish. Education and engagement would have lives of their own. Participation, when relevant, would follow informed choice rather than replace it.
This changes the business geometry. Traditional recruitment is organized around a study's clock. Acclinate tries to keep a second clock running continuously, one measured in repeated contact and community presence. Smith divides obstacles into structural and relational categories. Structural questions concern logistics such as site location, scheduling, travel, and compensation. Relational questions concern whom an organization engages, how consistently it appears, and whether its communication recognizes lived experience.
presence
insight
technology
The distinction is commercially important. A research sponsor can spend heavily on outreach and still discover that its sites are inconvenient, its message arrives too late, or the intended audience has never been invited into a genuine conversation. Acclinate's pitch is that community knowledge can influence decisions upstream, including protocol design and site selection, while helping teams act with greater precision later.
The model also offers a warning for anyone enchanted by artificial intelligence. A model trained only on yesterday's participants can reproduce yesterday's exclusions with impressive speed. Smith and Whitlow built their company around keeping people in the loop, both as community members shaping the data and as partners shaping the work. The algorithm gets a seat. It does not get the whole table.
That pairing also explains the durability of Smith and Whitlow's co-founder arrangement. Smith brings the doctorate, institutional management, technology background, and a fondness for systems. Whitlow brings community development, storytelling, and a talent for translating purpose into participation. Public appearances often find them completing the same argument from different directions. Acclinate's structure reflects the partnership: business-facing analytics beside a community-facing network, each more credible because the other exists.
Smith's published patent application offers another clue to his approach. Titled “System for Determining Clinical Trial Participation,” it describes technology for evaluating the likelihood of participation. The interesting part is not the legal prose, which has never been accused of dancing. It is the attempt to make a vague industry hope operational. Who is likely to participate? When should an invitation arrive? What form should it take? For Smith, these are design questions that data can inform, provided the data comes from relationships people knowingly joined.
The Birmingham bet
Acclinate began in Huntsville near the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. When the company considered its next base, Smith looked at familiar startup destinations, including Boston, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Birmingham won. It offered depth in healthcare and technology, visible support for minority-owned businesses, and the chance to become a meaningful participant in an emerging innovation economy.
A question from Birmingham business leader Victor Brown helped frame the decision: Did Smith want to be a small fish in a big pond? The metaphor stuck. A celebrated startup hub can provide abundant capital and talent while charging founders an invisible tax in attention. Birmingham offered proximity: to institutions, civic leaders, partners, and the communities Acclinate wanted to serve.
The move also completed a circle. Smith had founded his first company in Birmingham roughly 25 years earlier, sold it, and left to pursue doctoral study. He returned with more institutional scar tissue and a larger ambition. In a 2025 essay, he described the goal in public-market terms: build a company in Birmingham capable of reaching S&P 500 scale. Modesty is useful at dinner. It is less useful as a destination.
Capital did travel. In May 2024, Acclinate announced a $7 million Series A led by Cencora Ventures, with Labcorp and Latimer Ventures participating. The investor mix mattered: these were organizations adjacent to the work, not merely spectators with calculators. Public funding databases later recorded an additional $3.5 million debt round in 2026.
Recognition followed growth, though Smith's public language tends to return to the work rather than the trophy cabinet. Acclinate entered the Cox Enterprises Social Impact Accelerator powered by Techstars in 2021 as its only Alabama company. It later appeared on the Inc. 5000 and, in early 2026, received a Bronze Anthem Award for digital-health innovation. Awards are imperfect instruments. In this case, they mark the company's movement from an Alabama startup with a thesis to an operating business with national partnerships.
Scale showed up in community measures too. Acclinate's 2025 impact report said the company reached 20 million people, recorded engagement across 19 metropolitan areas, and continued expanding NOWINCLUDED. In 2026, it announced wider outreach to Hispanic, Latino, and Indigenous communities, alongside a partnership with HCN Global. These are company figures, and figures deserve scrutiny. They also show what Smith wants the business to become: national in reach, local in how it earns attention.
The moat that refuses to hurry
Software businesses adore speed. Relationships remain stubbornly analogue in one respect: they remember consistency. You can compress a file, shorten a sales cycle, and automate a report. You cannot batch-process credibility. Acclinate's strategic asset is therefore awkward and attractive at once. Its community has been built through time, events, education, stories, partnerships, and repeated invitations to speak back.
Smith's own career makes the patience plausible. A dean understands cohorts and long horizons. A researcher understands evidence. A city official understands coalitions. A technologist understands systems. A repeat founder understands that none of this saves you from payroll. Acclinate gathers all five lessons into one company.
His leadership language has evolved with the job. In a 2026 conversation, Smith described the founder's progression from player to coach to owner. The player executes. The coach develops a team. The owner designs an organization that can perform without requiring the founder to touch every decision. It is an especially relevant framework for a leader whose résumé proves he is comfortable doing many things himself.
The aspiration now is not subtle. Smith wants Acclinate to grow from Birmingham while influencing how research organizations think about community, representation, and evidence. The sharper lesson is available to founders in any field. Find the stakeholder everyone approaches only when they need something. Begin the relationship earlier. Give it a reason to continue after the transaction. Measure the work without flattening the people inside it.
Smith once framed his decision to act with plain economy: “You're probably the one most suited to address it. So that's what we did.” There is no theatrical founder mythology in the sentence. Only a diagnosis followed by an assignment. After years spent studying institutions, running them, and teaching others how to lead them, he gave himself the assignment. Acclinate is the answer he is still writing.