Most software companies guard their crown jewels behind a paywall. Scott Weidley runs the company that hands its crown jewel over for nothing. ClinCapture, the Las Vegas eClinical firm he has led since 2016, built its name on a single audacious line: the only validated electronic data capture software that sponsors and contract research organizations can use for free. In an industry famous for steep, opaque pricing, that is not a coupon. It is a worldview.
The product is called Captivate, and it sits at the center of what ClinCapture calls Virtual Data Capture - a suite built to run the remote and decentralized clinical trials that became the new normal. EDC, ePRO, CTMS, safety, CDISC conversion: the unglamorous plumbing of drug development. Weidley's job is to make that plumbing fast to build, cheap to run, and bearable to use for the people who live inside it - the coordinators, the data managers, the patients filling out forms on a phone.
He thinks about those people obsessively. "You can build the best technology in the world," he says, "but if it doesn't serve the people using it, it's worthless." It is the kind of line that sounds like a poster until you remember he means it literally - he priced the software at zero to prove the point.