What You Should Know:
– Castor raises $12M in Series A funding to further their support for COVID-19 research through clinical trial and data automation.
– With 4,000 live studies and 2,000,000 enrolled patients across 90 countries, Castor will use the funding to further invest in enabling patient-centric, data-powered clinical trials.
Castor, a Hoboken, New Jersey startup using automation and data reuse to simplify the entire clinical trial process, announced $12M in Series A funding led by Two Sigma Ventures with participation from Hambrecht Ducera Growth Ventures and existing investor INKEF Capital. Castor will use this new funding to further 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.
Based in the United States and The Netherlands, Castor is an international health-tech company founded by CEO Derk Arts, MD, PhD. Their cloud-based clinical data platform simplifies the clinical trial process, from recruitment to analysis, for researchers worldwide. Castor’s leading cloud-based clinical data platform is used by 50,000 researchers globally to run remote clinical trials and capture data from patients, physicians, EHR systems, and wearables. The platform transforms this data into a machine-readable format that facilitates the use of AI and makes large scale sharing and reuse of clinical trial data possible for the first time.
Powering COVID-19 Clinical Research Across The Globe
The company is at the forefront of fighting COVID-19 – the first to make its platform freely available for non-profit COVID-19 vaccine research. Over 200 COVID-19 projects across 33 countries are currently running on the platform, including the World Health Organization’s global Solidarity Trial. To date, Castor is powering 4,000+ studies with 2M+ patients across 90 countries and counts 192 medical device, biotech, and pharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations (CROs) as customers.
“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,” said Derk Arts, MD, PhD, CEO & Founder of Castor. “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.”
