Biorce is a Barcelona-based healthtech company building AI-native infrastructure for clinical trials. Its core product, Aika, helps pharmaceutical companies, biotechs and CROs design regulator-ready trial protocols in roughly 90 seconds, drawing on a corpus of more than one million clinical studies and 260,000+ protocols. By cutting protocol design time by at least 50% and flagging regulatory and feasibility risks early, Biorce aims to compress the years and billions of dollars it takes to bring a drug to market - so treatments reach patients sooner. In February 2026 it closed a USD $52.5M Series A led by DST Global, the largest Series A to date in the Iberian healthtech and AI ecosystem.
ClinChoice is a mid-size, global, full-service contract research organization (CRO) that helps pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device, and consumer health companies run clinical trials and bring drugs and devices to market. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Horsham, Pennsylvania, the firm employs roughly 4,000 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, offering clinical development, biometrics, safety/pharmacovigilance, regulatory affairs, post-marketing real-world evidence, and technology services. After rebranding from Fountain Medical Development (FMD K&L) in 2020 and raising a $150M Series E in 2022, ClinChoice has grown through acquisitions to serve six of the top ten pharma companies while focusing on emerging and mid-size biotech innovators.
John D. Balian, MD is a physician-turned-executive who co-founded ClinChoice, one of the world's larger full-service contract research organizations, and serves as its CEO, International. He spent years inside the FDA, then ran drug safety and regulatory operations at Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson before building a global CRO spanning the US, Europe and Southeast Asia. He is also a published novelist whose debut, Gray Wolves and White Doves, draws on his Armenian heritage and the Armenian Genocide.
Curavit Clinical Research is a Boston-based, all-virtual Contract Research Organization (CRO) that designs and runs decentralized clinical trials. Through its Virtual Clinical Site and STRATUS platform, Curavit recruits, enrolls, and monitors diverse patient populations remotely - eliminating physical site infrastructure and travel while improving data quality. The company specializes in trials for digital therapeutics (DTx) and partners with sponsors and existing CROs to fix the execution layer of clinical research, accelerating timelines and lowering costs.
Josh Rose is the CEO of Hawthorne Health, Inc. (formerly Hawthorne Effect), a Walnut Creek-based company building the largest community-based clinical trial site network in the U.S. A clinical research industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, Rose previously led decentralized clinical trial strategy at IQVIA and CVS Health before taking the helm at Hawthorne Health in early 2024. Under his leadership, Hawthorne has expanded to 75+ community locations, partnered with 40+ pharma sponsors, and pioneered a model that embeds certified clinical research staff inside independent pharmacies and patients' homes - bringing trials to communities that traditional research networks have long bypassed.
Dr. Michelle Longmire is the co-founder and CEO of Medable, the leading platform for agentic AI in clinical development. A Stanford-trained physician-scientist who grew up in a Los Alamos nuclear-research family, she pivoted from dermatology to founding Medable in 2015 after hitting enrollment walls in her own clinical research. Under her leadership, Medable has raised over $500 million in venture capital, deployed its platform in roughly 400 trials across 70 countries in 120 languages, and served more than one million patients globally - transforming how the world runs clinical trials.
Mike Novotny is the founder and CEO of Medrio, a San Francisco-based eClinical SaaS company he started in his apartment in 2005. Over 15 years he bootstrapped Medrio into a nine-figure company that has helped customers win regulatory approvals for more than 100 treatments. After a sabbatical researching organizational development, he returned as CEO in 2025, betting that AI will reshape clinical trial data management. Before Medrio, he was CEO of Telosa, President of Ninaza, a UN research associate, and managed the fraud database at Visa. He holds degrees from Stanford, PUC Chile, and Columbia.
Tom Lemberg is the Founder & CEO of Curebase, a San Francisco-based decentralized clinical trial platform that has enrolled over 60,000 patients across 60+ studies. A Harvard-trained computer scientist and molecular biologist, Lemberg built Curebase from his couch in 2017, joined Y Combinator in 2018, and raised $59M to transform how clinical trials work - letting patients participate from home and bringing their own doctors into the research process. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022, he's on a mission to make clinical trials accessible to any patient, anywhere.