Company Dossier · Health Research
People Science
The Los Angeles company turning clinical trials into software - and pointing it straight at the wellness aisle.
The Los Angeles company turning clinical trials into software - and pointing it straight at the wellness aisle.
Consider the modern supplement. It arrives in a handsome bottle, promises to support your gut, your sleep, your mitochondria, and it does all of this while carefully avoiding any claim that a regulator could pin down. The word "supports" is doing a lot of load-bearing work. The reason is not usually malice. It is that running a real clinical trial - the randomized, placebo-controlled kind that produces an actual number - has historically cost something like $300,000 and eighteen months, which is roughly $300,000 and eighteen months more than a probiotic startup has lying around.
People Science looked at that gap and decided it was a product. The company, founded in Los Angeles in 2019, builds software that lets health and wellness brands run clinical trials the way you would run a SaaS onboarding flow: remotely, from a participant's living room, with wearables collecting the passive data and lab partners like Quest Diagnostics processing the samples that need a vein. The platform is called Chloe. The idea is that if you make the trial cheap enough and fast enough, an entire category of companies that previously competed on marketing can start competing on results instead.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds, because the thing that keeps a low-evidence industry low-evidence is that evidence is expensive. When it stops being expensive, the incentives quietly invert. A brand that can prove its thing works has every reason to prove it, loudly, and a brand that cannot suddenly has some explaining to do. People Science is, in effect, selling the picks and shovels for that shift.
“A study that might cost $300K and take 18 months with a traditional CRO can be completed in about 6 months for a fraction of the cost.”
The most useful fact about People Science is that its founders have run this exact play before. Belinda Tan and Noah Craft are both MD-PhDs out of UCLA, and before this company they co-founded Science 37, a decentralized clinical trials company that ran remote trials for pharmaceutical clients and eventually reached a public-market valuation of roughly $1.1 billion. So when they say a trial can be run without a clinic, they are not theorizing. They built the version of it that Big Pharma used.
The obvious question is why start over. The answer is that Science 37 pointed decentralized trials at drugs, which is where the money and the regulation are, and left an enormous adjacent territory untouched: the sprawling, under-tested world of supplements, nutraceuticals, cannabinoids, psychedelics, and food-as-medicine. That is the territory People Science claimed. Same method, radically different customer.
There is also a smaller, more human detail that People Science does not hide: the two co-CEOs are married. Running a company is hard; running one with your spouse as your co-equal is a genre of difficulty that most cap tables never contemplate. They have leaned into it enough to give interviews about it.
Physician-scientist and former Assistant Professor at Harbor-UCLA. Co-founded Science 37 before People Science. Dermatologist by training, entrepreneur by second nature.
Physician-scientist, former Associate Professor at UCLA and Chief Medical Officer at VisualDx. Co-founded Science 37 alongside Tan, and now co-leads People Science.
Chloe is really two products wearing one name, pointed at two different people. For brands, there is Chloe Clinical - the research-management software where a company designs a study, gets it through an IRB, launches it, and manages everything from a prospective observational study up to a full randomized, placebo-controlled trial. For the humans in the study, there is the Chloe app, whose acronym-happy full name is the Consumer Health Learning and Organizing Ecosystem, and which lets participants enroll in paid research, track their own health, and watch their numbers move in real time.
End-to-end software to design, launch, and manage decentralized trials - observational studies through randomized, placebo-controlled designs - with data collected remotely from participants' homes.
Enroll in paid studies, track wellness, and see personal results in real time. Integrates Apple Health, Fitbit, and Garmin. Available on iOS and Android.
For brands without an in-house clinical team: protocol and trial design, IRB submission, execution, and analysis - including structure/function claim studies.
If you make a wellness product, People Science lets you run an actual study on it - across nine countries, with participants who never leave home - and come out the other side with data you can stand behind rather than a marketing adjective. The platform's declared range spans microbiome and food-as-medicine interventions, natural and synthetic psychedelic medicines, cannabis and cannabinoids, functional medicines, and digital therapeutics. If you are a person, you can enroll through the Chloe app, get paid, and run what amounts to a rigorously structured experiment on yourself - answering, as the app puts it, "which alternative medicines work best for me?"
The reason a seed-stage company can credibly aim at "the wellness industry" is that the wellness industry is enormous and, by clinical standards, mostly unexamined. People Science's backers frame the opportunity as a set of large markets that all share the same missing ingredient - proof. The virtual clinical trials market itself is the smaller slice; the categories it could validate are the giants.
Market figures as cited by investor Supply Change Capital. Bar widths are illustrative, scaled to the largest category.
“Empower humanity with the tools and knowledge of science and medicine to improve ourselves, our communities and our world.”
People Science founded in Los Angeles as a human-centered clinical research platform for wellness and alternative medicine.
Closes the first portion of its seed funding, building toward an $8.5M total.
Raises a $5.3M Seed II round led by Acre Venture Partners, with eight institutional investors.
Chloe operating across 40+ brand customers; app live on iOS and Android; runs a contest offering free platform access.
Chloe participant app updated (v1.339) with added Garmin wearable integration.
Watch & listen: the co-founders on The Pulse by Wharton Digital Health (human-centered clinical trials for alternative medicine) ·
Read the founder interview in Authority Magazine ·
Coverage in Nutraceuticals World.
For a live product demo, see the Chloe walkthrough linked from the company's website and app store listings above.