It is a Tuesday morning in San Francisco, and someone in Ohio has just typed "metastatic breast cancer trials near me" into Google. Two clicks later they are on a Power page, scrolling a list of studies that are actually open, actually nearby, and actually accepting people like them. They will apply in under four minutes. A research coordinator in Cleveland will call them by Thursday. None of that used to be possible.
The marketplace clinical research forgot to build.
Power is a five-year-old company with roughly 230 people, a Divisadero Street address, and an obsession that is hard to fake: making it stupidly simple for a patient to find a clinical trial. The site indexes more than 30,000 active U.S. studies across 10,000 conditions. Last year, more than 600,000 patients used it. That number is not a typo. It is also not a marketing line - it is the result of a team that decided the trial-finding problem was, at its core, a search and trust problem, and then spent four years quietly fixing both.
On one side of the marketplace are patients - people with cancer, depression, Crohn's, a parent's diagnosis, a friend's bad week. On the other side: research sites, sponsors, contract research organizations, and the small army of coordinators trying to fill studies that have, on average, been failing to fill on time for decades. Power sits between them and does the un-glamorous work of matching, screening, and following up.
The patient side is free. The money comes from the people running the trials, which is, as Oscar Wilde might have observed, the only honest business model in a system where the patient has historically been the product.
"We don't think of patients as 'leads.' That word has done a lot of damage in this industry."- The unwritten Power style guide
A $30 billion industry that runs on hold music.
Clinical trial recruitment is one of the most expensive bottlenecks in modern drug development. Roughly 80% of trials miss their enrollment timelines. The default tool for patients is ClinicalTrials.gov, a federal database that is comprehensive, authoritative, and built like a 1998 government form. The default tool for sponsors is direct mail, billboards, and a Rolodex of recruitment vendors charging by the head.
The result is a system where a drug that might extend a life by six months can sit waiting for a 200-patient cohort while patients who would gladly join cannot find the door. It is, in the most literal sense, a coordination failure. Information exists. It just refuses to meet itself.
Power's founders did not invent this observation. Half the industry has been writing white papers about it for twenty years. What Power did invent was the patience to actually build the marketplace, on the patient side first, before pitching the sponsors.
Numbers don't lie, but they do hold a grudge. These are the ones the industry has been ignoring.
Two Canadians, one diagnosis, one bet.
Michael "Bask" Gill and Brandon Li had built consumer marketplaces before. They ran growth and operations at Setter, a Toronto home-services company that Thumbtack acquired in 2020. The skill set was crisp: take a fragmented, opaque service category and make it searchable, trustable, and bookable.
Then in 2021, Gill's father was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Gill went looking for an immunotherapy trial. He could not find one in time. By the time he understood the landscape, his father had been put on an older first-line treatment that quietly disqualified him from the trials Gill had finally identified. Li had a parallel experience, helping a close friend search for a cancer trial.
The bet was simple, and a little contrarian: pharma had been pouring money into recruitment for thirty years without fixing the patient experience. So start there. Build a place patients actually want to use. Sponsors will follow the patients. It worked. Power emerged from stealth in 2022 with a $7M seed led by Footwork. By February 2024, Kin Ventures and Contrary led a $12M Series A.
"We failed to find my dad a trial. The least we can do is make sure other families don't."- Bask Gill, paraphrased from the founding letter
Four products, one mission, zero pamphlets.
Patient Marketplace
The front door. Search every active U.S. trial by condition, location, drug class, paid/unpaid, and eligibility. Apply in minutes.
Power for Sites
The tool research coordinators wish they had ten years ago. Qualified referrals, phone-screen automation, medical-record review.
Power for Sponsors
AI-driven recruitment that pulls timelines in by up to a third and pushes diversity up at the same time.
Power for Providers
A clean way for clinicians to surface trials for their patients without leaving the visit-or the EMR-behind.
All four sit on the same data layer. The patient sees a list. The coordinator sees a queue. The sponsor sees a forecast.
A short history of getting in the way of bad recruitment.
A timeline you could tell a stranger in an elevator. Which, given the founders' Toronto roots, has happened more than once.
Numbers, not adjectives.
In healthtech, the gravitational pull toward marketing language is intense. Power has resisted, mostly because the numbers don't need help. A gastroenterology trial that adopted Power saw enrollment lift by 25% - while simultaneously building a patient pool that was 81% non-white. Diversity is one of the hardest, most-promised, least-delivered metrics in trials. Power is delivering it as a side effect of search, not a special initiative.
Where Power moves the needle.
The bars start short and grow. Like every trial that finally gets a coordinator returning calls within 72 hours.
"Patient interest drops substantially after 72 hours. The whole industry has known this for years. Almost nobody acts on it."- A recurring point in Power's recruitment guides
Where patients find promising new treatments.
The line above is the company's tagline. It is also, unusually, the literal job description. Power's investors, listed in a 2024 memo by Contrary, were betting less on a technology moat than on a posture: build the marketplace from the patient side, even though it is the harder side to monetize, because that is where trust is built and trust is what the system has been missing.
The company has not, to its credit, tried to be a clinical research organization, a sponsor, or a hospital. It is the connective tissue. It indexes, it matches, it screens, it nudges. In a category that has historically rewarded companies for owning more of the patient, Power's restraint is its differentiator.
What happens when the front door works.
The interesting question is no longer whether Power will keep growing the patient side. It will. The interesting question is what happens to the rest of the system when 600,000 patients a year start expecting a real consumer experience from clinical research. Sites will need to answer the phone faster. Sponsors will need to design trials with the patient journey in mind. The federal database will, eventually, look like the relic it is.
That is the unsexy, durable kind of disruption. Not an app that replaces a doctor. A marketplace that finally makes the existing system legible. The drugs being tested on Power's platform today will be the standard treatments of the 2030s. Some of those patients will be alive because a tired sibling typed three words into a search bar on a Tuesday morning and found, on the second click, an answer that used to take six months to discover - if it was discoverable at all.
It is Tuesday morning in San Francisco again. Power's servers are answering search queries from Ohio, from Tampa, from a small town in Manitoba where someone is helping their mother. The list loads. The application is short. The phone will ring on Thursday. None of that is dramatic. All of it is the point.
Where to follow Power.
- Website: withpower.com
- Sponsor side: growwithpower.com
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/withpower
- Twitter / X: @withpowerhq
- About / Team: withpower.com/about-us
- Series A story: founding-story-update
- BetaKit coverage: Series A coverage
- Investor memo: Contrary on Power
- Seed coverage: Fierce Biotech
- Product demo / search: Browse trials
- Contact: hello@withpower.com
- Phone: (415) 900-4227