Tran Li was an engineering student at Stanford University who was enrolling in a clinical trial for a chronic disease. She identified several promising clinical trials, but found the enrollment process daunting. This required extensive email communication with clinical sites and the completion of a lengthy 20-page form.
All this paperwork was very cumbersome, so Le saw an opportunity to use generative AI to reduce the time it takes to enroll in a clinical trial from weeks to minutes. Last year, she co-founded Grove AI with fellow Stanford engineer Sohit Gatiganti.
Many patients are referred to clinical trials by their doctors, but others search websites such as clinicaltrials.gov to find suitable trials on their own. These registries help patients find relevant clinical studies, but contacting trial managers can be difficult and time-consuming. As with many things in the healthcare industry, it's hampered by understaffing, bureaucracy, and outdated systems.
Le and Gatiganti (pictured above) claim that Groves AI's agent, Grace, can solve enrollment bottlenecks by calling patients as soon as they express interest in a trial.
Grace uses a voice-based AI agent to ask pre-screening questions to determine if a patient is eligible for a clinical trial. If you do so, we will schedule an initial visit to the clinical site, where the trial administrator can make a final decision.
Since its founding eight months ago, Grove AI says it has interacted with more than 70,000 patients, scheduled 7,000 in-person appointments and secured two multi-year customers.
Grove AI may be solving a simple problem, but Le and Gatiganti say no other company is using generative AI to accelerate patient enrollment in clinical trials. “Many players in this space have contacted us and are very interested in partnering with us,” Lee said.
Investors also believe there may be value in reducing the bureaucratic hurdles associated with registering clinical trials.
Grove AI announced Wednesday that it has raised $4.9 million in seed funding led by venture firm A* with participation from Afore Capital, LifeX Ventures, and Pear VC.
“The market they're targeting isn't the biggest market today, but I think there's room for growth,” said Gautam Gupta, co-founder and general partner at A*. He added that the company believes advances in AI and computational biology will lead to an explosion in drug research and clinical trials. “Mr. Grove will benefit greatly,” he said.
Although he acknowledged that the technology behind Grove AI is not overly complex, he was excited about the company because it is in demand by many organizations, many of which have historically been slow to adopt new technology. I admitted.
In addition to the appeal of Grove AI's voice agent, Gupta sees great potential in the startup's efforts to collect patient data and organize it into relationship management tools.
While most clinical settings currently track patient interactions in spreadsheets, Grove is using AI to build a product that could eventually be used to manage patient records.
“We don't know how to quantify that opportunity right now, but we do know that it creates a fairly large moat and gradually creates monetization opportunities over time,” he said.