We are thrilled to announce our $4.9 million seed round, a milestone that fuels our mission to revolutionize participant relationships in clinical trials. With the support of industry investors, led by A* with participation from Afore Capital, LifeX Ventures, Pear VC, Upfront Ventures, and industry-leading angels including Ajit Baid (former Head of Global Asset at UCB), Chloe Yoo (Director at ICON, former CFO at HumanFirst), Phuc Truong (former Co-Founder of CRIO), and Till Pieper (former Google Cloud AI lead), we are excited to make clinical trials more efficient, diverse, and participant-centric.

The Challenge: Managing Personalized Participant Relationships at Speed and Scale

Clinical trials, the engine of medical progress, are plagued by inefficiencies: slow timelines, low participant engagement, and limited diversity. These challenges hinder the development of new treatments and create immense burdens for both sites and participants.

Our team at Grove has spent hundreds of hours visiting clinical trial sites, shadowing staff, speaking with participants, and signing up for trials ourselves. We’ve seen the bottlenecks firsthand: site staff overwhelmed by thousands of leads, participants unsupported and confused, and executive teams lacking the tools to scale trials effectively. These experiences cemented our belief that the industry needed an intelligent solution to handle the complexities of participant relationships.

As Gautam Gupta, Co-Founder and General Partner at A* said, “As clinical trials become increasingly complex, the industry requires solutions that not only interpret data but also deliver actionable insights and tangible results.”

Introducing Grace: The World’s Most Advanced AI Clinical Research Agent

Our answer to these challenges is an intelligent participant relationship management (PRM™) platform powered by Grace, the world’s most advanced AI clinical research agent. Grace is built to alleviate the burdens we’ve seen and empower clinical trial stakeholders at every level.

For participants, Grace provides personalized, multilingual support around the clock, managing everything from prescreening to follow-up reminders. In the last six months, Grace has facilitated over 250,000 participant interactions and scheduled more than 7,800 in-person appointments at sites across diverse participant populations and therapeutic areas. 

For site staff, Grace reduces the heavy administrative burden, enabling researchers to focus on high-quality participant care. Grace has saved clinical research sites over 22,600 hours of manual workflows.

For clinical operations leaders, Grace offers full visibility and control over recruitment and trial operations, providing the scalability needed to accelerate trial timelines and operational goals from months to days.

What’s Next for Grove

With our funding, we’re excited to expand our reach and deepen partnerships with pharmaceutical sponsors, CROs, and SMOs to drive a more accessible and efficient future for clinical research.

“In just two months of partnering with Grove, we transformed how our teams operate and engage with participants,” said Sean Stanton, co-founder of K2 Medical Research. “We prescreened and booked hundreds of participants for our Alzheimer’s and vaccine trials, freed our staff of thousands of hours of repetitive work, and gained insights that boosted our efficiency and scale. We look forward to expanding our partnership with Grove to launch more sites and trials at scale.”

At Grove, we’re committed to building purposeful, people-centric, and safe innovations to serve our communities. We’re deeply grateful to our investors, partners, and clinical research leaders—from site coordinators to patient advocates to clinical operations executives—for supporting our mission to advance clinical trials.

Follow us on LinkedIn for updates. We’re also hiring exceptional engineers and operators: careers@grovetrials.com.