LONDON, UK, July 23, 2025 – Bitfount, the federated AI platform transforming clinical research collaboration, has secured $8 million in Series A funding to scale its privacy-preserving network across healthcare systems globally. Parkwalk Advisors, Ahren Innovation Capital, Pace Ventures, Foresight Group, and Portfolio Ventures participated in the round.
Bitfount removes the data-sharing roadblock that has long held back clinical research. The most valuable insights come from combining datasets across multiple institutions, yet strict privacy regulations and competitive concerns make sharing impossible. This forces researchers to work with incomplete pictures, slowing drug development and limiting patient access to breakthrough treatments. Bitfount’s federated AI platform solves this by bringing algorithms to the data, not data to algorithms.
Healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies can collaborate to improve clinical research without ever sharing raw patient data. The platform works across both electronic health records (EHR) and medical imaging data – a unique capability that sets it apart from platforms limited to text-based analysis alone. It streamlines trial lifecycles by accelerating patient recruitment, reducing screen failure rates, and enabling data-driven site feasibility assessments – all while maintaining complete data sovereignty. AI model development is similarly accelerated.
The funding comes as the UK government unveils unprecedented support for clinical research through its 10 Year Health Plan, announced in June 2025. The plan aims to slash commercial trial set-up times from 250 days to 150 days or less by March 2026 and position the UK as a global destination for clinical trials. However, achieving these ambitious targets requires addressing fundamental infrastructure challenges – precisely what Bitfount’s federated AI platform delivers by enabling secure collaboration without the data-sharing bottlenecks that have historically slowed UK clinical research.
“Clinical research is broken by data silos,” said Dr Blaise Thomson, CEO and Co-founder of Bitfount, previously Chief Architect for Siri Understanding at Apple and former head of Apple’s Cambridge office. “We’ve built the missing infrastructure that lets organisations collaborate securely without the impossible choice between innovation and privacy. This investment moves us further towards our vision of unlocking the value of sensitive data for the benefit of humankind, and is a testament to the great work being done by the Bitfount team and to the support of our ecosystem partners.”
Co-founded with Dr Naaman Tammuz, the platform’s no-code desktop application can be deployed across any healthcare setting – from major hospital systems to small community clinics – creating a distributed network that preserves local data control while enabling global collaboration. This approach directly addresses the $102 billion AI for Healthcare and Life Sciences market, where data privacy concerns have historically limited AI adoption.
Early pilot implementations demonstrate significant impact across multiple therapeutic areas. In a validation study conducted with Moorfields Eye Hospital for a trial in Dry Age-Related Macular Degeneration (Dry AMD), the team demonstrated a reduction in screen failure rates from 60% for traditional EHR-based searches alone, to just 14% when EHR search was combined with AI-based OCT image analysis, while still identifying over 600 eligible patients at that single hospital. The platform enables pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organisations to identify suitable patients and optimal trial sites without accessing underlying patient records.
“Data sharing for medical research is often hampered by privacy concerns, fragmented systems, and regulatory barriers. I have experienced this first-hand multiple times during high-profile collaborations with both industry partners and academic institutions,” said Professor Pearse Keane, Consultant Ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital and Professor of Artificial Medical Intelligence at University College London. “Federated data science and AI offer a transformative solution by enabling insights to be discovered and shared across institutions without the need for sharing any raw data. This not only protects patient confidentiality but, by improving the speed, diversity and efficiency of clinical trials, can dramatically accelerate medical discoveries which benefit millions of patients.”
“We are excited to back Blaise Thomson, who previously successfully sold a Parkwalk portfolio company to Apple, and the rest of the formidable Bitfount team,” said Neil Cameron, Investment Director at Parkwalk. “Bitfount was conceived during Blaise’s time at Apple as a technology that could overcome many of the internal and external collaboration challenges faced by organisations with confidential data and security concerns. Bitfount’s initial focus on clinical trials is an area ideally suited to this type of AI application.”
The funding will accelerate product development and expand partnerships with commercial and academic AI model development organisations, particularly targeting pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organisations (CROs). Bitfount plans to extend its platform capabilities across the entire clinical research lifecycle, from protocol design through regulatory approval.
To find out more about Bitfount, visit their website or the Parkwalk portfolio page here.
