Derk Arts

Derk Arts is a Dutch physician-turned-entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Castor, a clinical-trial software company he started in 2012 after coding the first version of its Electronic Data Capture platform himself. Trained as a medical doctor and epidemiologist with a PhD, he built Castor to make clinical research more inclusive, patient-centric, and data-driven. The platform now supports thousands of trials across roughly 90 countries and was used by the World Health Organization for its Solidarity Trial. Castor has raised more than $60 million, including a $45 million Series B in 2021, and Arts is a recognized voice on decentralized trials, eConsent, and the responsible use of AI in research.