AI is creating reforms in all the major fields like agriculture, automobiles, e-commerce, HR, etc. But COVID-19 has slowed everything down. In the current pandemic situation, when healthcare has become the most important domain, and medical researchers are working day and night to improve the conditions, an Amsterdam based health-tech startup is helping to simplify the clinical trials using AI to help them.
Castor, a company that offers an AI-driven, cloud-based clinical data platform to help medical researchers globally, announced on Wednesday to have raised around $12M in a Series A funding led by Two Sigma Ventures with participation from Hambrecht Ducera Growth Ventures and INKEF Capital. Castor will use these funds to further improve its platform and maximize the support to the ongoing COVID-19 researches on its cloud-based platform.
Founded in 2012, it provides an Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system for researchers to easily capture and integrate data from different sources on one platform and make the research smooth and hassle-free. Back in February this year, Castor made its platform completely free for all non-profit COVID-19 researches. Castor has over 200 COVID-19 projects across 33 countries currently running on its platform, including WHO’s Solidarity trial. With over 10M captured COVID-19 data points, they enable large scale decentralized trials to accelerate the work of the researchers.
According to the Derk Arts, founder, and CEO of Castor, the key challenges ahead of the company are patient-centric research, maximizing the impact of data on human lives, and better addressing the needs of underserved communities, and they will use these funds to overcome these challenges and to further extend their support for the ongoing COVID-19 research.
Source: https://www.castoredc.com/press/castor-raises-12m-series-a/
Consultant Intern: Currently in her third year of B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Goa. She is an ML enthusiast and has a keen interest in Data Science. She is a very good learner and tries to be well versed with the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence.
