Profile / Founder · Healthcare Data
Robert Chu
A French engineer who spent thirty years watching how life sciences data moves, then decided it should move differently.
A French engineer who spent thirty years watching how life sciences data moves, then decided it should move differently.
Robert Chu is the co-founder and CEO of Embleema, a clinical research platform on West 28th Street in Manhattan that turns messy patient data into the kind of evidence the FDA is willing to look at without laughing. This is a harder problem than it sounds. Regulators want provenance. Sponsors want speed. Patients want to not be interrupted. The three requirements are in a permanent argument with each other, and someone has to write the software that mediates it. Chu, who used to run a $800 million SaaS business at IQVIA, is currently in charge of about twenty-nine people trying to.
Embleema is seven years into the argument. It started in 2017 with a pitch that included the word "blockchain" in a way that was fashionable at the time and is not anymore, and it has quietly evolved into something more pragmatic: e-consent, EMR integration, patient recruitment, study protocol customization, no-code workflows for clinical operations. The blockchain is still under the hood, doing the boring job it was designed for: making an auditable record of who agreed to what, and when. The rest of the platform is what pharma sponsors actually pay for.
The interesting question about Chu is not that he is doing this. Plenty of executives do healthtech startups. The interesting question is that he was, until 2015, Senior Vice President of Global Technology Solutions at IQVIA, running a business of fourteen hundred employees. And then he stopped. If you draw a career trajectory of an ambitious enterprise operator, this is the point where the line usually kinks upward toward a board seat, a big consultancy, a quiet role advising three portfolios. Chu's line goes the other direction. It goes to a walk-up in NoMad with two co-founders and no marketing team.
Embleema is what happened next.
Fourteen hundred people, $800 million in revenue, and he left to start a company of two.
Embleema calls its platform a "clinical research network." What that means, in practice, is a stack of services that clinical operations teams at pharma companies use to run studies. Patient consent. Study protocol design. Electronic data capture. Patient-reported outcomes. Wearable integration. Real-world evidence generation. The list gets long fast, which is the point. Modern clinical trials do not fit into one tool, and every seam in the workflow is where errors and delays come from.
Chu has said, in various interviews, that the thesis is patient-centric. The patient owns their record. They consent to what pharma sees. They can revoke that consent. The pharma sponsor gets cleaner data because the patient is engaged rather than surveyed. The FDA gets an auditable trail. This is a nice story. Whether it is the exact story that closes deals with pharma customers is a separate question, and Embleema has been iterating on that answer since 2018.
The pivot, if you want to call it one, is that Embleema stopped being about blockchain as a marketing message and started being about clinical operations as a product. The company's public materials now emphasize decentralized clinical trials, AI-powered data analysis, and no-code workflow customization. Every one of those phrases is fashionable in 2026 and was less fashionable in 2018. Chu's company was early on some of them and is now catching up to the vocabulary the market uses.
The people building this are mostly former operators from healthcare data or clinical research. Chu's co-founder Nicolas Schmidt, the Chief Product Officer, came from Withings and Nokia's health division. Tim Evain, the VP of Engineering, holds a PhD in medical imaging. The head of clinical operations was a registered nurse at NYU Langone. This is not a bunch of blockchain enthusiasts who wandered into healthcare; it is a bunch of healthcare people who decided the software they were forced to use was bad.
Trained at Ecole Polytechnique and Telecom Paris. IBM France. Ran the Telecommunications, Media & Utilities sector.
IBM Global Wireless Solutions Executive. First exposure to the American enterprise software sales model.
Ran Asia Pacific and China operations for IMS Health. Learned how patient data moves in markets with less legacy IT.
Embleema HQ at 44 West 28th Street, a block from the old flower district. Small team. Long thesis.
Chu founded Embleema after decades in enterprise. Most healthtech founders are younger, or come from clinical practice. He came from the vendor side, which shapes what the product looks like.
Most 2017-era blockchain healthtech companies quietly rebranded. Embleema kept the ledger, but treats it as infrastructure rather than pitch material.
Ecole Polytechnique and Telecom Paris are two of the most selective engineering schools in France. Both, back to back, is the French version of MIT and Stanford.
He has built data networks in twenty-plus countries. He is now doing it with a team small enough to fit in a single room.
The success metric for Embleema is not user growth. It is whether the FDA accepts what the platform produces. Different game.
Chu does not run a personal brand. His most-cited public appearances are podcasts about real-world data, not keynotes about himself.
The thesis behind Embleema is that the most expensive part of a clinical trial is not the science. It is the coordination. Recruiting patients. Getting consent. Tracking outcomes. Reconciling data from a dozen source systems into a submission the FDA will accept. Every one of those steps has been solved once, badly, by a different vendor, in a different decade, on a different assumption about what the workflow looked like.
Chu's bet is that the whole coordination layer is due for a rebuild, and that the rebuild should start with the patient. If the patient is the source of truth, and their consent is cryptographically recorded, then everything downstream, including what the sponsor sees, what the site enters, and what the regulator audits, becomes easier to reason about.
This is the kind of thesis that takes a long time to prove out. Embleema is seven years in and still small. Chu appears to be fine with that.
44 West 28th Street. NoMad. Historically the wholesale flower district of Manhattan, now full of small offices doing exactly this kind of work.
An 914 area code, which is Westchester County. Not a Manhattan number. The suburban commuter footprint is doing more work here than the SoHo aesthetic would suggest.
Grafana, Microsoft Azure, Slack, Webflow. This is a very 2020s New York healthtech tool stack, not a legacy pharma tool stack.
Embleema's public presence runs through the company Twitter account. Chu himself does not maintain a personal one that is easy to find.
Roughly $3.1M with about 23 people, per public founder profiles. Roughly $135K per employee. That is a specific kind of capital-efficient number.
Nicolas Schmidt, chief product officer, came from Withings and Nokia's health division. Two French founders, one American company.
The co-founder and CEO of Embleema, a New York clinical research platform. Formerly SVP of Global Technology Solutions at IQVIA and long-tenured at IMS Health and IBM.
2017. The company emerged from stealth in 2018 with a blockchain-based health record system.
SVP of Global Technology Solutions. He ran a business of about 1,400 employees and roughly $800M in SaaS revenue.
Ecole Polytechnique in Paris (Master's in Engineering, 1988), followed by Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (Master's in Computer Sciences, 1990).
44 West 28th Street, New York, NY.