Amber Hill spent 14 years as a medical researcher. She didn’t mind work, but there was one thing she always hated: administrative tasks.

“I think that’s the case for most people, especially in research,” she told TechCrunch. She prefers to analyze data or build relationships with patients, she said. “But I spent so much time doing manual tasks that didn’t require any medical expertise. This is a completely broken process and I knew it could be fixed.

So she did what any problem-solver would do: she started a business.

His startup, called Search gridwas founded in London in 2020. The company attempts to make clinical trials more efficient by automating administrative and data management workflow. It presents itself as the only software capable of automating complete back-office tests.

Research Grid announced a $6.48 million seed round on Tuesday, led by Fuel Ventures, with participation from firms including Ada Ventures and Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab.

Research Grid consists of two patented products: Inclusive and Trial Engine. Together, the products manage tasks such as protocol error reporting, data extraction, and workflow. Currently, clinical trials use a more manual process supported by legacy software systems that often result in costly delays during a trial.

“They’re built on old code bases, which means it’s almost impossible for them to innovate,” she said. “Our technology is already superior, and while the displacement of the big players won’t happen overnight, it’s going to happen, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t be the ones to do it.”

But there are other problems that Research Grid hopes to solve, 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 difficult to find people,” she explained. It is also difficult to be consistent when it comes to finding people who meet narrow and strict criteria for a research essay.

Currently, this is a very manual process, using untargeted social ads and analyzing health records. “If there is not enough participation, researchers cannot understand whether a drug or intervention is safe and effective, which ultimately means it is not approved by regulators to be administered to those who may need it most.”

Additionally, the FDA has now required that more diversified clinical trialssince women and people of color are often left out medical trials. Hill sought to build a customer relationship management feature in Research Grid which has more than 80,000 groups, in 157 countries, representing about 2,000 medical conditions, she said. “It uses AI to go way beyond traditional people search methods,” she said. “This helps partners find who they need in seconds rather than months.”

Hill was introduced to her lead investor by the EMEA team at venture capital firm Plug and Play, who participated early in this round. The company, which has raised $8 million in venture capital to date, will use this latest funding to invest further in research and development, strengthen its engineering team and continue expansion into the US and Asian markets.

“The next challenge is primarily building the enterprise infrastructure to serve these partners seamlessly,” she said of our operations in the US, UK and Asia.

Although this business, like many other big ones, was born out of a sense of frustration, Hill said she always had a passion for entrepreneurship. She ran a nonprofit organization while working on her doctorate to expand her access to research. Running the business has taught her to be resilient and resourceful, as well as how to work with different types of people. “I maintained a team of volunteers for three years without financial resources,” she remembers. “We raised money the hard way, in buckets, and took it to the bank. »

His first technology idea was to use AI to automate all the work needed to run a nonprofit. “We’ve come full circle because that idea turned into our trial-stage product and meaningful intellectual property,” she said. When she knew she wanted to start Research Grid, she applied to an incubator program to help her shift her “mindset from a nonprofit mentality to a for-profit mentality,” from “academic to entrepreneur”. She then completed an accelerator program that put her in front of some of London’s biggest investors; she raised her first £1 million – an achievement in a country where black founders raise less than 2% of all venture capital. And from 2019 to 2023, only eight Black women have raised more than $1 million in venture capital, as TechCrunch previously reported.

The hardest part for Hill was getting the company off the ground during the pandemic as a solo founder. She succeeded and is now in growth mode. Revenue grew more than 20-fold last year and is expected to continue growing, she said. The company works with large pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations and clinical sites, recruiting more experts and improving their AI technology.

“AI is accelerating precision medicine, drug development operations and changing the care pathway for everyone,” she said. “It’s here to stay.”

This story has been updated to reflect the exact number of search grids raised.