Peppermint Raises $4.7M to Bring Scientific Precision to the Finances of Clinical Research

Company’s AI-powered platform was purpose-built for clinical trial teams and hospital systems to transform clinical research into a scalable engine for financial growth and scientific discovery

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Peppermint, an AI-powered platform that streamlines financial operations and accelerates growth for clinical research teams, today announced $4.7 million in seed funding led by Moxxie, with participation from Homebrew, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Layout Ventures, Digital Health Venture Partners, Night Capital, and angel investors Benjamin Mann and Evan Moore. The funding will further enable the founding team, who previously built payments and reconciliation infrastructure for Robinhood, to transform clinical research into a scalable engine for financial growth and scientific discovery.

Despite advances in the science and technology driving novel drug development, the industry still relies on an antiquated and fragmented financial framework. Instead of payments flowing smoothly between sponsors, CROs, health systems, and research sites, clinical research relies on a patchwork of systems that were never designed to work together. Every party absorbs the cost of that complexity. Health systems carry it across an entire research portfolio, where the finances of clinical research remain one of the least visible lines on the balance sheet. Sites feel it most acutely: One-third of sites have more than 90 days’ worth of overdue receivables, and 50% of sites have three months or less of operating capital, according to a 2024 survey by the Society for Clinical Research Sites (SCRS).

Peppermint is the first AI-powered financial operations platform designed exclusively for clinical research, bringing the uncompromising precision and auditable accuracy of clinical science to its own revenue cycle.

Co-founders David Freeman and VJ Thurimella met at X1, where they were the respective first business hire and first engineer. Together, they helped build the financial infrastructure behind the consumer credit card business that Robinhood acquired to launch its Gold Card. When they saw the inefficiency of financial systems behind clinical research – and how it was depriving research teams of not only cash, but visibility into how much a study actually generates in revenue, how much it costs to run, and the metrics behind both – they knew their fintech experience could break open the industry’s financial black box.

“At X1 and Robinhood we helped build systems designed for precision and scale, to process billions of dollars every year,” said Freeman. “We’re bringing that architecture to clinical research, converting earnings into friction-free collections that also provide CROs and sponsors with cleaner data from the source.”

By combining purpose-built AI with expert human billers, Peppermint replaces the manual monthly billing cycle with a system that ingests data from a site's clinical trial management software, cross-references it against payment history and trial contracts, invoices instantly and continuously, and pursues collections on partners’ behalf. Because each invoice is validated against the record before it goes out, CROs and sponsors receive cleaner data and fewer disputes, while research organizations get more time to focus on what matters most: carrying out clinical trials.

These changes help clinical research teams get paid faster while giving finance leaders a live view of the metrics that drive financial health. And by working within a site’s existing software system, Peppermint is able to pull the data it needs to perform tasks without any migration or workflow change.

Peppermint has helped its partners collect revenue 3x faster and reduce overdue invoices by threefold while reclaiming 20% of staff time spent on billing. The number of studies under management by Peppermint has tripled in three months, reflecting growing demand from clinical research teams and hospital systems across the country.

Building on this momentum, Peppermint will use the funding to expand its platform beyond collections into budget negotiation, expense management, and clinical trial analytics — a full financial ledger for research operations. For health systems, that means margin visibility across an entire research portfolio for the first time. As the pace of discovery accelerates, Peppermint is building the financial framework to scale with it.

"There is no standard financial infrastructure for clinical trial billing today — every dollar a site is owed has to be reconstructed by hand from disconnected systems," said Alex Roetter, Managing Director and General Partner at Moxxie. "Peppermint is bringing the discipline of modern fintech to one of healthcare's least-examined back offices."

For more information, please visit getpeppermint.ai.

About Peppermint
Peppermint is the first AI-powered financial operations platform designed exclusively for the teams running clinical research. Founded by David Freeman and VJ Thurimella, who built payments and reconciliation infrastructure at Robinhood and X1, Peppermint combines advanced AI with expert human billers to bring the industry’s highly valued rigor to its own revenue cycle. The platform turns months of manual reconciliation into a continuous, audited record of every visit, invoice, and dollar a site is owed. Peppermint is focusing on finance today so that everyone running clinical trials has the capacity, and clarity, to advance new therapies faster.