Ivor Clarke, Founder and CEO, SubjectWell

Ivor Clarke is the Founder and CEO of SubjectWell, a patient recruitment platform for clinical trials. In medical research, finding the right mix of candidates for trials is one of the biggest bottlenecks in moving new therapeutics through the approval process. SubjectWell helps Pharmaceutical and BioTech companies execute clinical trials with truly diverse patient sets and deliver approved treatments to market much faster than before.

Ivor founded SubjectWell in 2012, with a vision for how technology could unlock new patient populations, especially for individuals who hadn’t considered participating in trials before. Ivor’s background at Datran Media, a digital marketing technology company that specialized in audience analytics, provided him the insight for how the internet could open new channels for patient recruitment. Ivor states that “SubjectWell expands access to clinical trials by engaging the 96 percent of the population that has never participated in clinical research.” Ivor also recognized that the pain point within clinical research was very acute. Ivor also recognized that quickly assembling a diverse patient set for a clinical was well outside of Pharma’s core competencies, yet it was a critical gating item for bringing a new therapeutic to market. If he could reach a broad audience using a scalable recruitment platform, and then optimize candidate pools based on research needs, a key barrier to delivering new treatments could finally be relieved.

Today, SubjectWell supports clinical trials for 15 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and recruits patients from four continents. The company’s 230-person team helps companies and Clinical Research Organizations (CROs) find qualified patients in over 175 therapeutic areas, including a more recent expansion into oncology for small-cell lung cancer and breast cancer.

Prior to founding SubjectWell, Ivor founded Hoot Call, a contact center that handled over 30,000 calls a day. Ivor served as Vice President while at Datran Media and was also a VP of Product Development at Skylist, a software development platform for enterprises. Ivor holds a Bachelor of Science in Human Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon.

We are thrilled that Ivor recently announced the successful close of the company’s $35 million Series B round, led by Asset Management Ventures, with participation from Frontier Venture Capital, Healthy VC, and Bertelsmann.