A 4-year-old London startup backed by Peter Thiel has raised a $55 million Series B round as it sets out to “fix the broken clinical trials industry.”
The announcement comes as artificial intelligence is shaping up to revolutionize drug discovery and development, in turn driving demand for a streamlined clinical trial process to help bring new drugs to market faster.
Lindus Health has built a platform that covers the entire end-to-end process of conducting clinical trials, with automation playing a central role – as such, Lindus calls itself the “anti-CRO” (contract research organization). A CRO, for the uninitiated, is an outside organization used by pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical device companies to conduct essential clinical research, which allows those companies to focus more on their core drug development work.
The CRO market was pegged as an $82 billion market last year and is projected to grow to $130 billion by the end of the decade.
Trials and tribulations
While clinical trials vary in size and scope, they typically involve several phases from start to finish, which include trial design, as well as building a protocol and regulatory submission package. After that, they must deploy the technology to run the trails, recruit patients and collect data. Together, that can take years, so when a potentially life-saving drug is on the cards, anything that can speed things up is a good thing.
Lindus says he can simplify many parts of this process by using machine learning, for example to design the initial protocol (a detailed plan), which can be very labor intensive. For this, Lindus has built a protocol generation tool trained on historical data that can create an initial draft.
While its software is a big part of Lindus’ offering, co-founder Meri Beckwith (pictured above right with co-founders Michael Young and Nik Haldimann) points out that the company offers everything needed to run a complete end-to-end clinical trial. , including the personnel necessary to carry it out.
“We have directly enrolled and provided treatment to more than 35,000 patients now. On staff, we have physicians, clinicians, technologists who are overseeing trial data, clinical operations and regulatory people,” Beckwith told TechCrunch in an interview last week.
Founded in 2021, Lindus Health has so far conducted clinical trials across Europe and the US, focusing on conditions such as asthma, acne, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, hypertension, weight management and social anxiety. These trials are either for testing drugs or testing new medical devices.
“What you can see is common to a lot of them, and what we’re excited about is that these are pretty complex, widespread conditions that a lot of people suffer from, and frankly, they’ve been neglected by the industry,” Beckwith. said.
Drug discovery
While the rise of AI is leading to all sorts of ethical and legal hurdles, one area that seems to be getting a lot of people excited is its potential applications in healthcare, particularly drug discovery.
A host of startups have raised truckloads of capital to apply artificial intelligence to the drug discovery process, and the company at the heart of much of it is Google’s DeepMind. In October, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, a deep learning model capable of predicting the 3D structure of proteins – data that is crucial to disease research and helping scientists to discover new drug candidates.
Hassabis predicts that all human diseases could be cured within a decade thanks to these advances. While some of the early indications are positive, clinical trials will be essential to prove the true value of the technology. As with the drug discovery industry, many startups have raised venture capital to modernize the dusty old clinical trial industry.
This raises an important question: Does all the hullabaloo around AI drug discovery lead to greater demand for clinical trial technology?
Beckwith, for his part, thinks there is a correlation.
“Honestly, all these AI drug discovery companies won’t have the impact they deserve if we don’t fix this hurdle in clinical trials,” he said. “The average AI drug discovery company comes up with targets and hypotheses about this drug, or that patient population, but you have to test them.”
For a pure software firm, the concept of testing, iterating, and shipping code quickly is pretty well ingrained in the company culture. But in biotech, even where software is central to operations, it has been difficult to adopt such a “move fast and break things” mantra.
This is for good reason, of course, as there is a world of difference between building a fashion market and developing life-saving pharmaceuticals. However, Beckwith says things could be greatly improved with more efficient clinical trial infrastructure.
“Our mission as a company is to help these biotech companies test and iterate faster and more safely with patients,” he said.
‘scratching the surface’
Lindus Health had previously raised about $25 million in equity and grant funding, including an $18 million Series A round in 2023 from Spotify investors Creandum and billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. With a fresh $55 million in the bank, the company is preparing to accelerate its expansion, which includes moving its global headquarters from the UK to the US – a transition that is currently underway.
Additionally, Lindus plans to invest more resources in its commercial go-to-market team, expand into “more complex” types of clinical trials, and strengthen its integrations with third-party tools such as electronic records medical.
As with any company worth its salt in 2025, Lindus is also exploring more applications for AI across its business, including ways to analyze clinical trial data in real time.
“We’re just scratching the surface of what we can do with AI,” Beckwith said.
Lindus Health’s Series B round was led by Balderton Capital, with support from Creandum, Firstminute, Seedcamp and Visionaries.
