Participated · Series A · May 2024

Acclinate is a health equity company focused on increasing diversity in clinical trials. Its core product is a community engagement platform trusted by top pharmaceutical brands to make existing trials more inclusive and to plan more diverse studies. The company also develops the Enhanced Diversity in Clinical Trials (e-DICT) platform and intends to enhance it with new funding. Acclinate raised $7 million in a Series A to scale its impact and expand its initiatives. The funding will support expansion of its community engagement efforts and initiatives aimed at inclusivity and equity in healthcare. The round brings strategic support from established healthcare organizations to help accelerate Acclinate's work. Acclinate Genetics offers a privacy-protecting digital health platform that uses machine learning and predictive analytics to identify and select more diverse clinical-trial and genomic research participants. The company positions its product to decrease the overall cost of drug development, increase the speed of drug approvals, integrate with virtual clinical trials, and contribute to new drug discovery. Co‑founders Del Smith and Tiffany Jordan‑Whitlow started the company after being personally impacted by the lack of minority representation in medicine. Acclinate recently gained backing from Bronze Valley and became the first bio company in that investor's portfolio. The company says it is focused on educating and engaging diverse individuals to make informed decisions about genomic research and clinical trial participation. Acclinate is seeking additional investors and partners as it continues to grow and scale; the clinical trial patient recruitment market is cited at $3.4 billion today and projected to grow to $5.3 billion by 2030.

Led · Series A · Mar 2024

Pienso offers a no-code AI suite that enables non-technical teams — researchers, marketers and customer support — to annotate data, train and deploy models without writing code. The platform guides users through labeling for pre-tuned open-source or custom models and can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises. It integrates with enterprise systems via APIs but can also operate without third-party services to keep data within a secure environment. Pricing is a yearly license based on the number of AI models a customer deploys, allowing customers to experiment before making large investments. Customers cited in the article include Sky (using Pienso to analyze customer service calls) and an unnamed U.S. government agency that tested it for monitoring illegal weapons tracking. Pienso was founded in 2016 by Birago Jones and Karthik Dinakar, who developed the core tools during research at MIT’s Media Lab. Pienso is a Brooklyn-based MIT spin-off that helps non-technical domain experts interact with and improve machine learning models. Its core product, the Intelligent Development Environment, is an end-to-end platform that includes Lens, a feature that lets non-technical users directly interact with ML algorithms. The company aims to solve the human-in-the-loop problem by embedding domain expertise into model training so nuance and context are preserved. CEO Birago Jones frames Pienso as a way to capture expert judgment from researchers, analysts and other knowledge workers who lack ML expertise. Pienso announced a $2.1 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures with participation from SoftTech VC, Indicator Ventures and E14 Fund. It plans to use the funding to grow its small team and start expanding its customer base.