Peppermint, an AI-powered financial operations platform built for clinical research teams, has raised $4.7 million in seed funding to help research organizations improve billing, collections and financial management.
The funding round was 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.
Peppermint was founded by David Freeman and VJ Thurimella, who previously helped build payments and reconciliation infrastructure at X1 and Robinhood. The founders are using their fintech experience to address financial challenges in the clinical research industry.
Clinical research payments often move through disconnected systems involving drug sponsors, contract research organizations (CROs), health systems and research sites. This can make it difficult for research teams to track payments, manage invoices and understand the financial performance of clinical trials.
Peppermint uses AI and human billing experts to automate much of this work. Its platform connects with existing clinical trial management software, checks trial data against contracts and payment history, generates invoices and helps manage collections.
The company said its platform has helped partners collect revenue three times faster, reduce overdue invoices by threefold and recover 20% of staff time previously spent on billing.
Peppermint has also seen the number of clinical studies under its management triple over the past three months, as more research teams and health systems adopt the platform.
The company plans to use the new funding to expand beyond collections into areas such as budget negotiation, expense management and clinical trial analytics. Its goal is to build a broader financial platform that gives research organizations better visibility into revenue, costs and profitability across clinical studies.
Founded by Freeman and Thurimella, Peppermint is building financial infrastructure specifically for clinical research teams, with a focus on helping them get paid faster and spend less time managing manual financial processes.
