Peter Thiel-backed business for clinical trials in the UK, Lindus Health, raises $18 million.
Lindus Health, a UK-based startup, aims to make clinical trials faster and easier by offering a "next-gen contract research organization" (CRO) that simplifies the process. The company raised $18 million in a Series A round of funding from big-name backers, including Spotify investor Creandum and billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Lindus was founded by Meri Beckwith, a former venture capitalist, and Michael Young, a former special adviser at Downing Street. Beckwith, who had direct experience with healthtech startups, found the clinical trial process to be dysfunctional during the pandemic. Michael Young, a former special adviser at Downing Street, emphasized the focus on drug approvals and NHS rollout rather than the clinical trials themselves.
Lindus Health, a UK startup, is offering a next-gen contract research organization (CRO) to streamline clinical trials, making them faster and easier. The company has raised $18 million in a Series A round of funding from major backers, including Spotify investor Creandum and billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Lindus Health focuses on the entire end-to-end process, competing with big CROs like Science 37, Koneksa, Curebase, and Florence Healthcare. The company has built a protocol generation tool, trained on its own historical protocols and gleaned from clinical trials.Data capture is a major part of the clinical trial process, and Lindus supports this by allowing trial staff to capture all data electronically from the get-go. The company trains models to analyze data in real-time as it is ingested, making all this data available in a centralized dashboard.
Lindus Health, a human condition company, has raised $6 million in funding from investors like Creandum and Peter Thiel. With an additional $18 million in the bank, the company plans to expand its presence across Europe and North America, where it has already delivered over 80 clinical trials since its inception two years ago. Lindus has focused on a handful of conditions, including depression, diabetes, and insomnia, and has expanded into drug products and other conditions like tinnitus, insomnia, menopause, and childhood myopia. The pharmaceutical industry has shifted its R&D focus to more niche conditions and rare diseases, which has led to the neglect of more common conditions like type 2 diabetes. Lindus's strongest competitive advantage is its scalable clinical trials.
Lindus has secured backers from various VCs, including Creandum, Firstminute Capital, Seedcamp, Hambro Perks, and Amino Collective. Peter Thiel, a prominent investor in the healthtech space, has doubled down on his investment, reflecting his views on the clinical trial status quo. Thiel has been vocal about the hurdles in getting new medicines to market, lambasting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and sparked controversy when he invested in a company that had previously taken its clinical trials offshore and avoided FDA oversight.
Lindus Health's focus is on solving technical and process problems, rather than pushing for change to regulations. According to Young, regulatory agencies might do more to motivate sponsors to innovate within a preexisting regulatory framework.
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