patient-recruitment
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Conquest Research Found Drug Development's Most Human Bottleneck: The Patients
Drug makers can design a promising study and still lose years waiting for the right people to enroll. Conquest Research built a local, patient-facing machine to make that slow middle move faster - then took it across three states.
The Doctor Who Built a Research Machine Because He Never Had Time to Do Research
Dr Matt Wilson spent 14-hour shifts in emergency medicine with no time to eat, let alone run a study. So he built a platform that makes the research happen without the clinician lifting a finger - and pharma is paying to plug in.
The Birmingham startup that made pharma pay for trust it never earned
Del Smith and Tiffany Whitlow built a 200,000-member community first and an AI second - and got seven of the ten biggest drug makers to buy the trust they earned.
HealthKey
HealthKey is an AI-powered patient identification platform for clinical trial sites. It connects directly to a clinic's electronic health record system, reads every patient chart - including scanned and faxed PDFs - and scores each patient against a trial's eligibility criteria. Doctors get a ranked list of likely-qualifying candidates with the supporting evidence highlighted, replacing slow manual chart review. HealthKey charges success fees per enrolled patient, so sites pay only when it works. Founded in 2025 by Josh Sabol and backed by Y Combinator (W25), the company is based in Austin, Texas.
Curebase
Curebase is a San Francisco-based eClinical software company building an AI-powered platform that runs clinical trials around patients' lives instead of inside hospital walls. Its single system spans study startup to database lock - combining electronic data capture (EDC), eConsent, ePRO/eCOA, patient recruitment, and a virtual research site model - so sponsors can launch decentralized and hybrid trials faster, capture cleaner data, and reach more diverse participant populations.
Curavit Clinical Research
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.
Formation Bio
Formation Bio is a New York-based, AI-native pharmaceutical company that acquires and in-licenses clinical-stage drug candidates and runs them through a proprietary, technology-driven development platform to bring treatments to patients faster and at lower cost. Formerly known as TrialSpark, the company rebranded in December 2023 and raised a $372M Series D in June 2024 led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sanofi. It pairs in-house drug selection expertise with AI tools for trial design, recruitment, regulatory writing, and safety monitoring, and partnered with OpenAI and Sanofi to build purpose-built AI agents for drug development.
Hawthorne Health
Hawthorne Health is a clinical trials company that decentralizes research by sending GCP-trained medical professionals - called Hawthorne Heroes - directly into patients' homes, pharmacies, and community settings. Founded in 2015 by former Edwards Lifesciences executive Jodi Akin, the company operates the largest mobile nurse network in clinical research, covering 50+ states and territories, with access to over 1,000 community-based locations. Their technology platform and distributed workforce model have completed 76+ trials with a 99% visit completion rate while achieving patient diversity metrics 3-10x above industry standards.
Bask Gill
Bask Gill is the Co-Founder of Power (withpower.com), a San Francisco-based clinical trial platform that uses AI to match patients with clinical trials. After watching his father struggle to navigate a broken clinical trial discovery system following a multiple myeloma diagnosis, Bask co-founded Power in May 2021 alongside Brandon Li. The platform has connected over 600,000 patients to trials across 10,000+ medical conditions, with 40% being non-white patients - a deliberate focus on diversity and access. Power has raised $19M in funding including a $12M Series A in early 2024, and grown to 230 employees.
Power
Power is a patient-first marketplace for clinical trials. The platform helps patients discover and enroll in promising research studies, while giving sites, sponsors, and CROs an AI-driven engine to accelerate recruitment across 30,000+ active U.S. trials and 10,000+ conditions.