Inato’s Trust-Building Playbook: Winning Enterprise Customers in Regulated Markets

Selling to regulated industries isn’t like selling to typical enterprises. The stakes are higher, the timelines are longer, and mistakes can have devastating consequences. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Kourosh Davarpanah revealed how Inato built trust with pharmaceutical companies while transforming clinical trial access.

Forget What You Know About Disruption

Silicon Valley’s standard playbook of moving fast and breaking things doesn’t work in healthcare. As Kourosh emphasizes, “Silicon Valley often has this notion of tech outsiders that come in and single handedly revolutionize a sector. And I think clearly in the healthcare industry, this is something that never works.”

The reasons are clear. “Because the industry is super regulated, and for very good reasons, they tend to be very concerned about the idea of trying out new approaches that not only might not make a dent in terms of the speed of patients enrolled in the study, but might actually put them in a really bad position if the study is not conducted in a way that is ethically proper,” Kourosh explains.

Build Trust Through Expertise

Instead of disruption, Inato focused on building deep credibility. “You need to have experts internally that the pharma are going to trust,” Kourosh shares. Their approach involved creating an “amazing customer success team with dozens of years of pharma experience” to guide pharmaceutical companies through processes that were “partly product and partly still human based.”

This expertise-first approach helped them navigate the first critical phase: “This took us through the first batch of, say, five to ten trials. And along the way we really started to understand what does the pharma company want to see? What data points do they need to really create trust with sites?”

Focus on Core Problems First

Rather than trying to solve everything at once, Inato took a methodical approach to building trust. “What was quite unique to us is we ended up focusing on the discovery piece, on the matching piece for a really long period of time,” Kourosh notes. “We’re only now, after about three years, starting to expand to support everything you would expect in terms of the admin work, the legal work, the pricing, the payment, et cetera. But the trust point was so complex that we ended up spending all of our time for the first few years.”

Find Partners Who Understand Your Vision

Even when raising capital, Inato prioritized finding partners who deeply understood the space. “I think what I’ve learned about fundraising is that we often say you need to educate VCs, but I think you can only go so far in terms of education. I think it’s actually often impossible to get a VC excited if you’re in a really complex industry that they’re not passionate about.”

This led them to investors who had already done deep research in their space. In one case, an investor “had been working on the space for a really long time and he started pitching this idea of a marketplace. And after five minutes I told him, well, great, this is what we’re building. And we ended up signing after a week or so without ever meeting.”

The Results of Patient Trust-Building

Today, Inato works with over half of the top pharmaceutical companies and approximately 3,500 sites across 50 countries, growing revenue by 600% in the past year. Their marketplace is transforming how hospitals and pharmaceutical companies collaborate on clinical trials.

For founders selling to regulated industries, Inato’s experience offers crucial lessons. Success requires rejecting the typical startup playbook, investing heavily in industry expertise, focusing on core trust-building features before expanding scope, and finding partners who truly understand your market. In regulated industries, trust isn’t just about your product—it’s about proving you understand and respect the complexities of the ecosystem you’re entering.