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Amber Hill spent 14 years as a medical researcher. She didn’t mind working, but there was one thing she constantly hated: administrative tasks.
“I think most people do, especially in research,” she told TechCrunch. She would rather analyze data or build relationships with patients. “But I was spending a lot of time doing manual tasks that didn’t require any medical expertise. It’s a completely broken process, and I knew it could be fixed.”
So, I did what any problem solver would do: I launched a company.
Its beginning, called Research Networkfounded in London in 2020. The company is trying to make clinical trials more efficient by automating administrative workflow and data management. It hails itself as the only software that can automate complete back office experiences.
Research Grid on Tuesday announced a $6.4 million seed round, led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from firms including Ada Ventures and Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab.
The research network consists of two patented products: the universal engine and the experimental engine. Together, the products handle tasks such as protocol error reporting, data extraction, and workflow. Currently, clinical trials use a manual process supported by outdated software systems that often cause expensive delays during the trial.
“They are built on legacy code bases, which means it is almost impossible for them to innovate,” she said. “Our technology is already superior, and although displacing the big players won’t happen overnight, it will happen, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t do it.”
But there are other issues the research network hopes to address, such as making clinical recruitment faster and better dealing with the pressure that often comes from the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) regarding compliance. Hiring can take months, she said, “and it’s manual and administrative and it’s hard to find people.” It is also difficult to do this consistently when it comes to finding people who fit the narrow and strict criteria of a research experiment.
Right now, it’s a very manual process, using untargeted social advertising and health record analysis. “If there is not enough participation, researchers will not be able to understand whether a drug or intervention is safe and effective, which ultimately means it is not approved by regulators to go to the people who may need it most.”
In addition, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now made this requirement necessary Clinical trials are more diverseSince women and people of color It is often excluded From medical experiments. Hill said she sought to build a CRM feature into the Research Grid, which includes more than 80,000 groups in 157 countries, representing about 2,000 medical conditions. “It uses artificial intelligence to extend beyond traditional ways of finding people,” she said. “It helps partners find who they need to find in seconds instead of months.”
Hill was introduced to the lead investor by the EMEA team of investment firm Plug and Play, which participated early in the round. The company, which has raised $8 million in venture funding to date, will use this latest funding to invest in more R&D, build out its engineering team, and continue expanding into US and Asian markets.
“The next challenge is primarily creating the corporate infrastructure to serve these partners seamlessly,” she said of working in the US, UK and Asia.
Although this company, like many great companies, was created out of a point of frustration, Hill said she has always had a passion for entrepreneurship. She ran a non-profit while studying for her PhD as a way to expand her access to research. Business management taught her how to be flexible and resourceful, and how to work with different types of people. “I kept a volunteer team together for three years with no financial resources,” she recalls. “We collected the ‘old school’ donations the hard way in buckets and took them to the bank.”
Her first technology idea was to use artificial intelligence to automate all the work that goes into running a non-profit. “We have come full circle because this idea has turned into our pretrial product and meaningful intellectual property,” she said. When she learned she wanted to launch Research Grid, she applied to an incubator program to help shift her “mindset from nonprofit to for-profit,” from “academic to entrepreneur.” She then went through a business accelerator program that put her in front of some of the biggest investors in London; It has raised its first £1 million, a remarkable achievement in a country where black founders raise less than 2% of all venture capital. And from 2019 to 2023, only eight Black women raised more than $1 million in venture funding, as TechCrunch previously reported.
The hardest part for Hill was launching the company during the pandemic as a solo founder. She made it and is now in growth mode. She said revenues increased more than 20-fold last year and are expected to continue to grow. The company is working across major pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations, and clinical sites, hiring more experts, and improving their AI technology.
“AI is accelerating precision medicine, drug development processes, and changing the course of care for everyone,” she said. “It’s here to stay.”
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