October 27, 2026 | Peppermint raises $4.7 million to speed payments to clinical trial sites; Clinisys adds document intelligence to its laboratory platform; and more.

FutureMeds announced it has acquired Medical Center Hera, expanding its clinical research presence in Bulgaria across Sofia, Plovdiv, Montana and Kyustendil. Since 2019, Hera has supported more than 100,000 patients and taken part in more than 200 clinical trials, and its network of more than 70 specialists covers areas including cardiology, respiratory medicine, endocrinology, gastroenterology, neurology, dermatology, rheumatology and internal medicine. For sponsors and CROs, the combination is intended to provide a broader investigator network, added central nervous system (CNS) capabilities, patient referral pathways across the four cities, shared feasibility and quality support, and access to FutureMeds' European network and decentralized trial services. Hera will continue under founder and director Emil Kostov with its current operating model, and FutureMeds will initially support IT, feasibility and central operations. Press release.

Oracle announced a non-binding agreement with AstraZeneca to explore using AI and real-world data to help clinicians identify patients eligible for clinical trials, speed up evidence generation and bring research insights into routine care. AstraZeneca will contribute scientific and therapeutic expertise, and Oracle will contribute health data, cloud, AI, analytics and clinical workflow capabilities. The companies plan to explore use cases aimed at making trials more efficient, identifying eligible patients earlier, expanding access to trials and addressing patient recruitment. Initial disease areas under consideration are oncology; cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases; respiratory and immunology; and rare diseases. The companies also intend to explore a continuous learning model supported by shared governance, reusable technical components and agreed outcome measures. Press release.

IQVIA and Veeva Systems announced an expanded partnership under which IQVIA will use Veeva CTMS, Veeva eTMF, Veeva Study Startup and Veeva Site Connect as enterprise standard applications across its clinical development studies. The expansion extends the companies' previously announced electronic data capture (EDC) partnership. All Veeva clinical solutions will also be available through IQVIA for sponsors seeking a full Veeva technology stack. Press release.

PacBio and Verily Health announced a multi-year strategic collaboration to integrate PacBio HiFi long-read sequencing with Verily Pre, Verily Health's governed data and AI platform, pairing long-read genomic data with real-world clinical data at population scale. The resulting AI-ready clinico-genomic datasets are intended for biomedical discovery, AI model training and deployment. Verily Health will configure Pre Workbench, which serves more than 20,000 researchers, as the governed environment for aggregating, analyzing and curating HiFi genomic datasets, and the companies plan to use Verily Pre's trusted agentic environment for model training and inference. PacBio HiFi whole-genome sequencing workflows already run end-to-end within Verily Pre. The integration is to expand over the collaboration to support larger long-read programs across research organizations, biopharma and population genomics. Press release.

Peppermint, an AI-powered financial operations platform for clinical research teams, announced it has raised $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 platform combines AI with human billing specialists. It pulls data from a site's clinical trial management software, checks it against payment history and trial contracts, sends validated invoices on a continuous basis and pursues collections, working within a site's existing software with no migration required. The company reported that partners have collected revenue three times faster, cut overdue invoices threefold and reclaimed 20% of staff time spent on billing. The funding will support expansion into budget negotiation, expense management and clinical trial analytics. Press release.

ParkourSC has acquired Quartic, combining ParkourSC's clinical and commercial supply chain AI with Quartic's manufacturing AI into a single platform for regulated life sciences and healthcare. The platform links manufacturing data with clinical, distribution and healthcare data to predict which batches, lots and shipments are at risk and recommend actions such as adjusting a process, rerouting a shipment, prioritizing inventory or accelerating release. Deviation, verification, release, excursion, disposition and regulatory documentation are managed in one environment within predefined guardrails. The platform sits above existing MES, LIMS, QMS, historian and logistics systems rather than replacing them. Reported outcomes include cutting fit-for-use disposition decisions from three days to one minute and 15–20% higher batch yields in biologics manufacturing. Financial terms were not disclosed. Press release

Clinisys announced it is adding integrated document intelligence capabilities to the Clinisys Laboratory Solution (CLS), designed to help laboratories capture, govern, search and act on documents and other unstructured content such as requisitions, reports, scanned documents, images and quality records. The capabilities use optical character recognition, automated classification, metadata extraction and indexing to turn that content into searchable, workflow-ready information within the platform. Features include centralized document governance and management, search across structured and unstructured data, traceability, auditability and lifecycle management, and document-driven review, routing and approval workflows. The capabilities complement the Clinisys Analytics Module, CLS CARE, electronic laboratory notebook integration and agent-enabled laboratory workflows under development. Press release.