The Story of Inato: Building the Airbnb of Clinical Trials

Breaking family tradition isn’t easy, especially when everyone around you is in medicine. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Kourosh Davarpanah shared how his decision to pursue engineering instead of medicine eventually led to founding Inato, a company revolutionizing clinical trial access.

The Path Less Traveled

Coming from a family where “virtually everyone has been in the medical field for ages,” Kourosh took a different path. “I’m the only one of all of them who decided not to go to medical school,” he shares. “Some part of it was that I’m a little bit geeky, very passionate about maths and physics, and anyhow, I would faint whenever I would see blood as a kid, so not a great quality for a doctor.”

After college, Kourosh’s entrepreneurial journey began with a trucking industry startup that never took off. But the experience taught him valuable lessons: “It was super interesting to me in terms of knowing what I enjoy and what I’m not interested in. It was very clear to me coming out of this that I need a mission that I’m really passionate about, and logistics definitely wasn’t it.”

Finding the Right Problem

The healthcare industry presented a shocking reality: less than 5% of patients have access to clinical trials, and diversity among trial participants is alarmingly low. Kourosh shares a striking example: “Out of the about 8000 patients that were in the different trials, only three patients were African American, and the disease predominantly affects African Americans. So when you’re in that type of situation, you don’t even know if the drug that comes to market really works on African Americans.”

The root cause wasn’t immediately apparent. After four years of building a SaaS solution for pharmaceutical companies, Inato discovered that “the 5% top hospitals in the world run about 70 plus percent of trials. So if as a patient, you’re not treated in one of those hospitals, chances are that you have no way of participating to a trial.”

The Bold Reset

This realization led to a dramatic decision. “We pivoted after four years,” Kourosh recalls. “And when I say pivoted, it was a hard pivot. We went back to no clients, no revenue, no product, nothing.” They rebuilt from scratch, creating a marketplace connecting hospitals with pharmaceutical companies.

The pivot proved transformative. “We did more revenue on year two with the new model than we did on year four of the previous one.” 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.

Inspiration and Impact

Kourosh draws inspiration from marketplace pioneers like Airbnb, particularly their ability to create change without obvious tailwinds. “If you think about Airbnb… it feels like if they hadn’t existed, the hospitality industry probably would not have changed significantly for like a decade or so.” He sees parallels with healthcare, where “things have not been moving for ages.”

The Future Vision

Looking ahead, Kourosh envisions making clinical trial access as seamless as booking accommodation: “The big picture for us is making it as easy for any hospital in the world to offer trials to their patients as it is to book a place on Airbnb.” This vision requires completely reimagining the collaboration between pharmaceutical companies and hospitals.

The current process takes six months of paperwork before doctors can offer trials to patients. Kourosh believes marketplaces can transform this: “If you really want to increase patient access by, say, an order of magnitude, you really need to completely reinvent the collaboration model between pharma and hospitals… from discovery all the way to the partnership being sealed, this takes a week and not a year.”

For Inato, success means more than building a profitable business—it’s about ensuring that groundbreaking medical treatments work for everyone, regardless of where they receive care. By connecting more hospitals with clinical trials, they’re working to make medical research more accessible, diverse, and effective for all patients.