Tran Le was an engineering student at Stanford University when she tried to enroll in a clinical trial for her chronic condition. Although she identified some promising trials, she found the enrollment process daunting—she had to have extensive email exchanges with clinical sites and fill out lengthy 20-page forms.
All that paperwork was so cumbersome, Le saw an opportunity to use generative AI to reduce the time it takes to enroll in a trial from weeks to minutes. Earlier this year, she teamed up with Sohit Gatiganti, a fellow engineer at Stanford Medicine, to co-found Grove AI.
Although many patients are referred to clinical trials by their doctors, some people search for appropriate trials independently by searching the clinicaltrials.gov website. These registries can help patients discover relevant clinical studies, but contacting a trial’s administrators can be challenging and time-consuming. As with many things in health care, understaffing, bureaucracy and outdated systems get in the way.
Le and Gatiganti (pictured above) claim that Groves AI agent Grace can solve the enrollment hurdle by calling patients as soon as they express interest in a trial.
Grace uses a voice-based AI agent to ask pre-screening questions to determine if a patient qualifies for a trial. If they do, it can schedule a first visit to the clinical site, where trial managers can make the final determination.
Since its founding eight months ago, Grove AI says it has interacted with 250,000 patients, scheduled 7,000 in-person appointments and landed two customers with multi-year contracts.
Grove AI can solve a straightforward problem, but according to Le and Gatiganti, no other company is using generative AI to help speed patient enrollment in trials. “Many of the players in this space are approaching us and they are very interested in partnering with us,” Le said.
Investors also think there may be value in reducing the bureaucratic hurdles associated with enrolling in clinical trials.
On Wednesday, Grove AI said it had raised $5.2 million in seed funding led by venture firm A*, with participation from Afore Capital, LifeX Ventures and Pear VC.
“The market they’re going after is not the biggest market today, but I think there’s room for it to grow,” said Gautam Gupta, co-founder and general partner at A*. He added that his firm believes advances in AI and computational biology will lead to an explosion of drug discovery and clinical trials. “Grove will be a big beneficiary,” he said.
Gupta acknowledged that the technology powering Grove AI is not very complex, but the fact that it is being sought after by many organizations, many of which have historically been slow to adopt new technologies, made him excited about the company.
In addition to finding Grove AI’s voice agent compelling, Gupta sees significant potential in the startup’s efforts to collect and organize patient data into a relationship management tool.
Most clinical sites currently keep track of patient interactions on spreadsheets, but Grove is using its AI to build a product that could eventually be used to manage patient data.
“I don’t know how to quantify that opportunity right now, but I do know that it creates a pretty significant gap and, over time, will create incremental monetization opportunities,” he said.
