Saathvik Boompelli is the CEO and co-founder of Alleviate Health, a US-based healthtech startup that recently raised $4.3 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz(a16z). The round also saw participation from Alt Capital and First Harmonic, Boompelli announced on Monday, October 13.
The startup leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make patient recruitment easy and efficient for clinical research sites, enabling engagement at scale through voice and SMS agents.
“They’ve built an enterprise-grade AI platform, won the trust of leading research sites, and are shipping at the pace of the best early-stage engineering teams we’ve seen,” Marc Andrusko, a partner at a16z, said.
Funding and the Duke University connect
Boompelli and his co-founder, John Xu, were students at Duke University when they began building the platform. There, they happened to meet Andrusko, who was back at his alma mater as a guest lecturer and wanted to spend time with the university’s emerging founder community.
This eventually paved the way for the funding deal.
“I didn’t expect to source a deal — I was just excited to contribute to Duke’s growing culture of tech and entrepreneurship. But then I met Saathvik and John — two standout engineers already building a thriving AI company in one of the most regulated industries on earth. What started as a coffee conversation in the bowels of the business school quickly turned into a flight to NYC and a $4M term sheet,” he wrote on X.
He explained that Alleviate Health transforms how clinical sites engage, screen, and schedule patients, emphasising that patient recruitment remains one of the hardest parts of running a clinical trial. The cost of such a largely inefficient model is medical studies getting delayed or derailed.
How does Alleviate Health work?
Alleviate helps clinical research sites reach more patients by automating recruitment. Its AI-powered SMS and voice agents screen potential participants, connect qualified leads to recruiters, and update clinical trial management systems in real time.
At present, the startup is working with seven leading research site networks in the US, including Alcanza Clinical Research, CenExel, Centricity Research, M3 Wake Research, Eximia Research, and Profound Research, among others.
The co-founders say AI agents on the platform have been “battle-tested” having gone through more than 500,000 patient interactions across over 190 sites and over 300 unique trials.
“They yield the highest conversion rates of any solution on the market because they’ve been optimized across every possible patient population, indication, and workflow in the recruitment process,” Boompelli wrote in the announcement post on X.
Is this a case of AI taking over humans? The young founder does not believe so. “Despite the constant noise around AI in this industry, it will never replace the human connection needed to successfully recruit patients for clinical trials,” he wrote.
The platform, he said, removes the drudgery of initial pre-screening, outbound calls, voicemails, and manual updating of systems.
