Peppermint Raises $4.7M Seed to Automate Clinical Research Billing

Peppermint Closes $4.7M Seed Round

Peppermint, an AI-powered financial operations platform built exclusively for clinical research teams, sites, and hospital systems, has raised $4.7 million in seed funding. The round was led by Moxxie Ventures.

Additional participants in the round include Night Capital, Homebrew, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Digital Health Venture Partners, Layout Ventures, and angel investors Benjamin Mann and Evan Moore.

What Peppermint Does

Peppermint targets a specific and often underserved corner of healthcare finance: the billing and collections workflow inside clinical research. The platform ingests data from a site's existing clinical trial management software, then validates every visit and invoice against trial contracts and payment history. From there, it invoices continuously and pursues collections.

The company combines purpose-built AI with expert human billers. According to Peppermint, the platform requires no workflow change or data migration, which lowers the operational barrier for research sites and hospital systems considering adoption.

The Problem in Clinical Research Billing

Clinical trial billing sits at the intersection of two complex systems: the contractual terms governing a sponsor-funded study and the payment operations of the research site. Matching visits and invoices to the correct contract terms, and then chasing payment, is labor-intensive and error-prone work. Peppermint's approach is to automate the validation and invoicing steps while keeping human billers in the loop for collections.

Early Traction

Peppermint says early partners collect revenue three times faster while reclaiming 20% of staff time previously spent on billing. These figures come from the company and reflect early partner experience rather than audited results.

Founding Team

Peppermint was founded by David Freeman and VJ Thurimella. The two previously built payments and reconciliation infrastructure at X1, a company that Robinhood acquired to launch its Gold Card. That background in payments infrastructure and reconciliation is directly relevant to Peppermint's core challenge: reconciling clinical trial activity against contracts and payment history at scale.

Why This Round Matters

The seed round gives Peppermint capital to expand its AI-plus-human-billing model across clinical research sites and hospital systems. The investor group spans generalist early-stage funds and healthcare-focused capital, with Digital Health Venture Partners and Moxxie Ventures among the participants alongside fintech-oriented backers such as Better Tomorrow Ventures and Homebrew.

For acquisition watchers, Peppermint sits in a category where strategic interest tends to come from clinical trial technology vendors, healthcare revenue cycle management companies, and payments infrastructure providers. The company's integration-light deployment model — no workflow change or data migration — is a notable characteristic for any party evaluating how easily the product could be absorbed into an existing platform.

Round Summary

• Company: Peppermint
• Round: Seed
• Amount: $4.7 million USD
• Lead investor: Moxxie Ventures
• Additional investors: Night Capital, Homebrew, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Digital Health Venture Partners, Layout Ventures, Benjamin Mann, Evan Moore
• Funding date: October 8, 2026
• Founders: David Freeman and VJ Thurimella

Peppermint's focus on clinical research financial operations, combined with a founding team that has already built and sold payments and reconciliation infrastructure, positions it in a niche where automation adoption is still early. The seed funding provides runway to convert early partner results into a broader footprint across research sites and hospital systems.