Our investment in Delfa to fix clinical trials
Bringing drugs to market faster with AI agents.
Clinical trials are the bottleneck of the pharmaceutical industry. They’re slow, expensive, and often fail, not only because the science frequently doesn’t pan out, but because the ops don’t either.
That’s why we’re leading the $3.8M Seed round for Delfa. The team is building an AI-native operating system for clinical trials, starting with patient enrolment, the most broken part of the process.
The bane of spreadsheets and phone tag
There are 22,000+ drug candidates in the global pipeline but just ~5,000 new trials start each year. More than a third of the cost and delay comes down to a single operational challenge: finding, qualifying, and enrolling patients.
It’s still a manual funnel. Sites use Excel trackers. Recruiters cold-call lists, answer the same questions, collect medical histories by phone, and schedule visits by email. Every site solves the same problem in isolation.
Delfa solves recruitment with AI agents
Delfa replaces the human bottleneck with AI agents that fulfill the role of expert recruiters. They are trained with clinical trial documentation and guardrailed accordingly. Every patient interaction is logged, reviewed, and scored across 20+ QA metrics. Physicians audit the outputs. Alerts fire in real time when something looks off.
The AI agents can speak with patients in any language by phone, SMS, or chat; prescreen for medical eligibility; answer questions; collect histories; book visits; and write directly into a site’s CRM or CTMS.
In just a few months, Delfa’s solution is live across 50+ trials and multiple indications. Delfa works with top site networks like Flourish, Elevate, and Re:Cognition. Importantly, these site networks had the option of continuing with large recruitment teams and legacy tools, but chose Delfa instead. In one migraine study, a single site exceeded its enrollment target by 25%, saved 20 recruiter hours, and achieved an 11% lead-to-enrolled rate. In a vaccine trial, Delfa’s agent matched human conversion rates.
Why we invested
We’ve spent years backing the entrepreneurs building the future of drug discovery, including Valence Discovery (acq. by Recursion), Allcyte (acq. by Exscientia), and most recently, Profluent. That work gave us a front-row seat to how promising science gets bottlenecked in the clinic.
Delfa is the first team we’ve seen turn that bottleneck into software infrastructure. They’re translating the potential of AI agents into something that helps real patients, real sites, and real sponsors. But recruitment is just the beginning. Delfa is building a full-stack OS for clinical trials: from smarter site selection to automated study start-up and long-term patient retention. It’s a bet on turning clinical ops from artisanal workflows into scalable software.
We’re hiring!
AI agents are finally good enough to take on repetitive, high-volume, high-compliance workflows in healthcare. Delfa is one of the few teams translating that capability into measurable ROI, and doing it in a wedge that touches every new drug.
CEO Tom Farrand has built and deployed applied AI across J&J, Medtronic, and Exscientia. CTO Gustav Bredell trained at ETH Zurich, built early foundation models at Roche, and has deep experience in medical AI systems.
Come join the growing team in London and SF!
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