San Diego-based agentic AI clinical-development startup Faro announced on August 26 that it has closed a $37.3 million Series B co-led by Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and S32, with participation from every existing investor and new investor Ankona Capital.
Six of the top 10 pharmas onboard
Faro Health is now used by six of the world's ten largest pharmaceutical companies to design clinical protocols, author regulated documents, flag risks and inconsistencies and automate increasingly complex development workflows. Its pitch: AI agents that reason across an entire study rather than one document at a time.
Founder and CEO Alan Louie has spent years arguing that the underlying constraint in biopharma is not model quality but structure. Faro built a set of proprietary clinical development data models that turn the concepts, relationships, constraints and intent behind a study into machine-readable objects agents can operate on. "Documents remain important outputs. They are just not the underlying system of record," the company wrote in a note announcing the round.
Where the money goes
Faro said the new capital will accelerate the buildout of agentic AI capabilities that span from first-in-human study design through submission, and support customers deploying agents across their development organizations. Existing backers General Catalyst, Northpond Ventures, Polaris Partners, PTX Capital and Zetta all rolled into the round.
Riding the agentic biopharma wave
The financing lands as agentic AI money floods life sciences. Wrtn Technologies just closed a $72 million Series C at a $722M valuation in South Korea for its consumer AI platform, while grid-flexible data-center software vendor Emerald AI closed $150 million to solve the compute side of the same problem. Robotics AI leader Generalist AI banked another $200 million on Aug. 24 at a $3 billion valuation. Investors are betting that agentic systems that can execute complex multi-step workflows—not just generate content—are the next durable enterprise category.
The next milestones
Faro said its ambition extends beyond protocols into the interconnected workflows across study design, execution and downstream regulatory work. The company said the same structured-intent foundation could later extend across the broader development lifecycle.
Reporting based on coverage from Faro Health, Endpoints News, TechCrunch and FinSMEs.