Amber Hill spent 14 years as a medical researcher. She didn't mind the work, but there was one thing she always hated: administrative tasks.
“I think most people do, especially in research,” she said. She would rather analyze data or build relationships with patients, she said. “But I spent a lot of time doing manual tasks that didn’t require any medical expertise. It’s a process that is completely broken, and I knew it could be fixed.”
So he did what any problem solver would do: he started a company.
His startup, called r.grid was founded in London in 2020. The company is attempting to make clinical trials more efficient by automating the administrative and data management workflow. It bills itself as the only software that can automate entire medical administrative trials.
Research Grid announced a $6,4 million seed round led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from Ada Ventures and Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab.
Research Grid consists of two proprietary products: Inclusive and Trial Engine. Together, the products handle tasks such as protocol error flagging, data extraction, and workflow. Right now, clinical trials use a more manual process supported by legacy software systems that often cause expensive delays during a trial.
“They are built on old code bases, which means it is almost impossible for them to innovate,” he said. “Our technology is already superior, and while displacing the big players will not happen overnight, it will happen, and I don’t see why we won’t be the ones to do it.”
But there are other issues Research Grid hopes to address, such as speeding up clinical recruitment and better handling the pressure that often comes from the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) regarding compliance. Recruitment can take months — “it’s manual, administrative and hard to find professionals,” she said. It’s also complex to do consistently when trying to find people who fit narrow, strict criteria for a research trial.
Right now, it’s a very manual process, using untargeted social ads and analyzing medical records. “If there’s not enough engagement, researchers can’t understand whether a drug or intervention is safe and effective, which ultimately means regulators don’t approve it to reach the people who need it most.”
In addition, the FDA has now made it a requirement to do so more diverse clinical trials since women and people of color often left out of medical trials. Hill sought to build a customer relationship management function at Research Grid, which has more than 80.000 groups, in 157 countries, representing about 2.000 medical conditions. “It uses AI to go far beyond traditional methods of finding people,” he said. “It helps partners find who they need in seconds instead of months.”
Hill was introduced to its lead investor by the EMEA team of venture firm Plug and Play, which was the initial investor in this round. The company, which has raised $8 million in venture funding to date, will use this latest funding to invest in further research and development, build out its engineering team, and expand further into the US and Asian markets.
“The next challenge is primarily to establish the corporate infrastructure to seamlessly serve these partners,” he said of operations in the US, UK and Asia.
Although this company, like many great ones, was built from a point of frustration, Hill said she always had a passion for entrepreneurship. She ran a nonprofit while studying for her PhD as a way to expand her access to research. Running the business taught her to be resilient and resourceful, and to work with different types of people. “I maintained a team of volunteers for three years with no financial resources,” she recalls. “We raised funds the ‘old school’ way the hard way and put them into the charity’s account.”
Her first tech idea was to use AI to automate all the work involved in running a nonprofit. “We’ve come full circle because that idea morphed into our pre-test product and our significant intellectual property.” When she knew she wanted to launch Research Grid, she applied to an incubation program to help her shift her “mindset from nonprofit to a company with a bottom line and profits,” from “academic to entrepreneurial.” She then went through an accelerator program that put her in front of some of the biggest investors in London; she raised her first million pounds, a feat in a country where black founders raise less than 2% of all venture capital. And from 2019 to 2023, just eight black women raised more than $1 million in venture funding.
The hardest part for Hill was getting the company off the ground during the pandemic as a solo founder. Now it’s in growth mode. Revenue grew more than 20-fold last year and is expected to continue growing, she said. The company is working with big pharma, research organizations and clinical sites, hiring more experts and improving its artificial intelligence technology.
“AI is accelerating precision medicine, drug development operations and changing the care pathway for everyone,” he said. “It is here to stay.”
