Castor, an electronic data capturing platform for the clinical trial process, raised $12 million in Series A round.
Two Sigma Ventures led the funding with participation from Hambrecht Ducera Growth Ventures and existing investor INKEF Capital.
The company plans to use the new funding to strengthen its support for patient-centric, remote trials and to enable customers to maximize value from existing and newly generated data throughout the clinical trial process.
Castor’s cloud-based platform simplifies the clinical trial process, from recruitment to analysis, for researchers worldwide. According to the company, its platform is used by more than 50,000 users across academia and commercial research, powering more than 4,000 studies with more than 2,000,000 enrolled patients across 90 countries. More than 200 COVID-19 projects across 33 countries are currently running on the platform, including the World Health Organization’s global Solidarity trial.
Derk Arts, MD, Ph.D., CEO & Founder of Castor, said, “There are three key challenges that need to be addressed in the clinical trial space: making research more patient-centric, maximizing the impact of data on human lives, and better addressing the needs of underserved communities.” “With this new investment, we will be able to make significant progress in all three areas by continuing to deliver user-friendly, accessible technology that can support remote trials while ensuring machine-readable output that allows for trial automation and data reuse. In the next 18 months, we intend to support our customers with patient recruitment and synthetic control arms through better use of their data. We are excited to partner with Two Sigma Ventures, who bring extensive experience in leveraging the power of data and AI to disrupt incumbent industries.”
Villi Iltchev, Partner at Two Sigma Ventures, commented, “We believe that the life sciences industry is lacking a comprehensive and scalable solution for recruiting candidates for clinical trials, managing the research process, and effectively harnessing the vast amounts of data those clinical trials produce to drive medical breakthroughs.” “Castor’s technology and team have the ability to meet all of those needs, as evidenced by their customer demand and ability to enter new segments. It is our belief that their vision to enable AI and automation in clinical trials will quickly change the face of clinical research.”
According to Mercom Funding and M&A Report, in a notable deal with similar technology, Swedish-based digital clinical trial recruitment platform Trialbee raised €11M (~$12M) in a funding round.
