Scott Climes built a business on software that already worked

Scott Climes arrived at a software opportunity with an unusual advantage: the software had already spent years being useful. Vanderbilt’s REDCap application had a community, a history and a name people recognized. The commercial undertaking was to give that existing work a different route into the world. A license provided the opening. Building a company around it would occupy rather more of the calendar.

There is something pleasingly unfashionable about this starting point. The standard startup fable likes an empty garage and a revelation. Climes’s story has university intellectual property, commercial experience and the practical question of who might pay for a hosted service. Less cinematic, perhaps. But a subscription does have the advantage of arriving more than once.

Today he is the co-founder and CEO associated with REDCap Cloud, the platform developed by nPhase. In September 2026, nPhase launched nPhase.ai, extending its work into AI-assisted data management. Across those chapters, the business keeps returning to the same stubborn material: information that needs to move between systems and become useful to someone making a decision.

A commercial education, in two senses

Climes earned a BA in economics at San Diego State University in 1989 and an MBA at the University of Redlands in 1996. His early career included Merck, AstraMerck and AstraZeneca. By 2006, he had moved into a vice presidency covering sales and commercial operations at Biogen Idec, a position he held through 2008.

These are useful details for understanding the kind of founder who later appeared at nPhase. His professional background included selling, marketing and operating inside established organizations. That gives the story a commercial starting point: customers, distribution and the machinery that turns a product into an enterprise. The degrees supply dates; the sequence of employers supplies the scale of the apprenticeship.

The subsequent move into smaller ventures changed that scale. Climes founded BioSense in 2008 and was involved with the boutique venture firm TreanaVentures from 2011. His career had begun to include the company-building side of the table. By the time REDCap Cloud emerged, he had already worked across large businesses, early ventures and investment activity.

The mobile-phone interlude

Before the Vanderbilt chapter, there was 800 Commerce. Climes became its CEO and a director on September 11, 2012, following an advisory relationship. The company’s proposed business combined electronic merchant payments, mobile marketing and consumer search. It belonged to a period when the mobile phone was becoming an increasingly ambitious shop window.

One planned service, MY800, would let a consumer send a category by text and receive a reply listing nearby providers. Merchants were to pay for listings and related services. The proposed revenue mix included recurring subscriptions, transaction charges and professional services. Even in a business built around a short text message, the commercial model had several moving parts.

Those were plans, with the uncertainties plans deserve. Their interest here is the business territory Climes occupied: hosted technology, customers reached through a platform, and recurring fees. The vocabulary would appear again in a different setting. On August 1, 2014, he resigned as CEO and director. The departure makes a clean chronological hinge before the nPhase years.

A license with a past

REDCap’s original creator was Paul Harris at Vanderbilt, where the application began in 2004. Climes entered the story later, through the commercial company. That division of roles matters. The invention had an established academic life before REDCap Cloud acquired its commercial one; the company’s task was to develop and deliver a hosted offering around that foundation.

Vanderbilt announced the licensing arrangement in February 2016. The scale of the original application was already substantial: nearly 2,000 institutions across 96 countries had licensed it by the preceding month. Those figures describe Vanderbilt’s existing network, rather than REDCap Cloud’s customer count. They explain why the starting line was unusually well populated.

Climes’s language at the announcement emphasized the accumulated work behind the application. He pointed to more than a decade of development and feedback. A university license can sound like paperwork. Here it represented access to a product shaped by repeated use. The commercial opportunity lay in carrying that experience into a service with a different operating model.

“REDCap has been in continuous development and deployment for more than 10 years”Scott Climes, February 2016

There is a particular kind of restraint in beginning with something that already works. It leaves less room for an immaculate origin myth, but more room to ask practical questions. What belongs in the service? Which customers need it? What will make them stay? Those questions are a useful way to read the business Climes was assembling.

Twenty people, and a market beyond the obvious

By September 2016, nPhase was based in Encinitas, California, with about 20 full-time-equivalent staff. It had completed a roughly $1.9 million Series A. Climes, then chairman and CEO, was discussing the possibility of a workforce reaching three figures. That was an ambition at the time, rather than a headcount already achieved.

His description of the market was more revealing than the growth forecast. Of roughly 70 providers globally, he said, the two or three largest concentrated on the leading 25 prospective customers. Smaller enterprises sat outside that central contest. It was a recognizable commercial opening: an established market can contain plenty of competition while still leaving customers inadequately served.

The observation gives this part of his story its shape. Climes was talking about the distribution of attention, as well as the software itself. A market does not become fully served merely because it has many vendors. If the largest suppliers crowd around the same accounts, the seating plan begins to look rather repetitive.

A July 2017 financing notice adds another dated marker. Signed by Climes as president and CEO, it reported approximately $1.61 million sold in an offering. Jaya Prakash Guda and Mark Lama appeared among the executive officers, with Ben Walton and Alan Bentley among the directors. The business had people, governance and capital behind its product plans.

The dashboard becomes part of the story

In September 2019, nPhase released REDCap Cloud Business Intelligence Studio. The product brought analytics and warehousing into the picture, with live dashboards, reports and the ability to combine information across a portfolio of projects. Customers could use it independently or as an integrated part of the broader platform.

That choice of packaging is a small but telling detail. A standalone offering gives a product its own commercial doorway. An integrated offering gives existing customers another reason to use the platform. Both routes appeared in the launch. The company was broadening what it sold around the data it helped customers collect and manage.

Climes said the team had spent the previous two years working with clients on integration, transformation and enrichment. Those verbs lack the social charm of a launch party, but they explain the product’s direction. Collection was becoming one part of a longer sequence. The next question was how to make information intelligible and available across an organization.

“We have worked with clients over the last two years”Scott Climes, September 2019

That client work offers a concrete account of development without requiring a flash of inspiration. The release described a period of collaboration followed by a product. In Climes’s public business story, it is one of the clearest glimpses of how a new capability reached the market: two years of work, then a name and an offering.

Following the information further

The September 2025 release of REDCap Cloud 2.0 continued that expansion. Its announced capabilities included combining disparate data, automated quality checks, auditable lineage and connections to external tools. The design emphasized an open architecture. For a business that began by commercializing a hosted application, the remit had grown considerably.

Read as a business sequence, the progression is straightforward. First comes a place to capture and manage data. Then come tools for seeing it across projects. Then comes the effort to reconcile information from different systems. Each stage adds work around the original collection point. The growing scope is visible in the products, without needing to invent a private master plan.

In September 2026, nPhase introduced nPhase.ai and a statistical computing environment. The launch included support for governed workflows and tools using SAS, R and Python. Climes’s accompanying comments emphasized combining AI with human oversight. The company was again moving further along the route from raw information to outputs people could use.

Oversight is a significant word in that proposition. Automation still needs a way for people to examine and govern the work. The contemporary pitch joins speed to control, an appropriately demanding pairing for enterprise software. A faster process is commercially interesting; a process an organization can understand and manage has a different sort of staying power.

Climes is based in Atlantic Beach, Florida. His company’s leadership now includes technology chief Jaya Prakash Rao, operating chief Dave Sunderhaft and finance chief Mark Lama. The geographical setting has changed from the early Encinitas chapter, while the work remains distributed across a wider team and customer base.

The satisfying thread in this career is the accumulation of commercial tasks around an established product: licensing it, finding customers, financing the company, extending the offering and giving the next capability somewhere to live. Climes began the REDCap Cloud chapter with software that had already earned its place. A decade later, the continuing assignment is to earn a place for what comes next.