Medable Secures $78M Series C Extension To Scale Digital Clinical Trials Program

Clinical trials research company Medable brought in its third round of funding in the past year,  this time a $78 million extension to its $91 million Series C round announced last November.

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“This new round was really an insider round,” Medable co-founder and CEO Michelle Longmire, M.D., told Crunchbase News. “We were not really raising money, but they saw the continued growth we were having and wanted to have another bite of the apple. It gives us wind in our sails to optimize at our full commercial potential.”

The Palo Alto-based company’s digital platform streamlines design, recruitment, retention and data quality for decentralized clinical trials, so patients, sites and clinical trial teams are better connected and patient access, experience and outcomes are improved.

Existing investor Sapphire Ventures led the new round of funding and was joined by new investor Obvious Ventures and existing investors GSR Ventures, PPD and Streamlined Ventures.

“When we met Medable, the team, product and mission stood out immediately,” said Tina

Hoang-To, partner at Obvious Ventures, in a statement. “Unlike competitors that have built technology for a single part of the value chain, Medable addresses every part of the clinical trial tech stack from patient recruitment to virtual visits to outcomes assessment — enabling customers to run trials anytime anywhere on a single platform.”

The new investment brings Medable’s total funding to $217 million, Longmire said. This includes both the Series C and a $25 million round raised last May. She did not disclose the company’s new valuation, but did reveal that it “was a significant step-up from two months ago.”

Since its initial Series C round last November, Medable experienced strong commercial growth of 400 percent in revenue driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and demand for remote clinical trial technologies. It also launched five new products and onboarded more than 50 new clients and saw more than 90 percent retention rate among customers during the year.

“We see this growth continuing on the same trajectory, and compared to all of the tech categories, we were almost an outlier in terms of growth,” Longmire said.

COVID-19 threw a wrench in the traditional method of clinical trials, in which participants usually travel to a clinical site for an in-person evaluation. A year later, Longmire sees clinical trial companies like Medable bringing research to patients similar to delivery companies bringing food to homes.

Prior to the pandemic, decentralized approaches were used in 15 percent of clinical trials, and after, in more than 70 percent, she added.

“At the same time, we’ve executed more than 100 studies,” Longmire said. “We are bringing clinical trials into the community by enabling it to be part of primary care, your local pharmacy, imaging center and labs. We are mapping out a full system of touch points and care delivery, as well as collecting data within one mile of your home, and in some cases inside the home.”

Meanwhile, with a focus on tapping into the health care industry’s shift to accelerated patient-centered drug development, key areas for the new funding will center around enabling broader adoption of digital trials and patient-centric strategies at a global scale, including ubiquitous research access, patient data fluidity, and intelligent monitoring of patients and clinical trial data.

The company has also rounded out its leadership team, which now includes Chief Scientific Officer Pamela Tenaerts and Chief Product Officer Parag Vaish, as well as both its first Chief Design Officer Sina Mossayeb and its first Chief Operating Officer Andrea Valente.

Medable’s platform is being used in more than 60 countries and is available in more than 40 languages, and the company intends to bring more standardization to clinical trials no matter where someone is around the globe, Longmire said.

Next up, Longmire plans to raise a larger Series D in the fall.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias