Skip to content
HOMETECH DIRECTORYNEWS & DEVELOPMENTSRELOCATEEMPLOYERSNEIGHBORHOODSABOUTSchedule a Call

Ripple Science: Inside the Ann Arbor Clinical Trial Software Company

Ripple Science builds clinical trial recruitment SaaS from Ann Arbor. Customers include Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Penn State, U-M, and Cognito Therapeutics.

A2Hub Editorial· Rusty Roof Media· Updated May 4, 2026

Ripple Science

By A2Hub Editorial. Published 2026-04-22. Last updated: 2026-04-22.

At a glance

  • Founded: 2016
  • HQ: Ann Arbor, Michigan
  • Customers: Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Penn State, University of Michigan, Cognito Therapeutics, and additional academic medical centers and biopharma sponsors
  • Status: Private, growth-stage
  • Website: ripplescience.com

The pitch in one line

Ripple Science builds the software that academic medical centers and biopharma sponsors use to recruit, engage, and retain participants in clinical trials. The Ann Arbor team has assembled a customer roster that includes Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Penn State, U-M, and Cognito Therapeutics, all built around a clinical-trial-operations workflow that the academic and industry sponsors universally hate but cannot avoid.

Founding story: a clinical operations problem in software clothing

Ripple Science was founded in 2016 in Ann Arbor with a thesis that runs through every clinical operations conversation in academic medicine and biopharma: clinical trial recruitment and retention is the single most expensive, most delayed, and most uncertain piece of running a clinical trial, and the software stack supporting it is decades behind the rest of the clinical research workflow.

The numbers behind that thesis are well-known inside the industry. The plurality of clinical trials miss their enrollment targets. Sites recruit participants at lower rates than projected. Participants drop out at higher rates than modeled. Each of these failures cascades into trial extensions, additional sites, additional spend, and in the worst case, abandoned programs. The economic consequences flow through to drug pricing, the pace of medical innovation, and the risk-adjusted economics of clinical-stage biopharma.

Ripple Science's bet was that a purpose-built software platform for participant recruitment, engagement, and retention could move those numbers in a measurable way. The platform handles the operations workflow that every trial coordinator runs: tracking participants through the recruitment funnel, communicating with them through the trial timeline, capturing the consent and screening data, and managing the retention workflow that determines how many enrolled participants actually complete the trial.

What they build

Ripple Science's platform spans clinical trial recruitment, engagement, and retention. The product handles:

Recruitment. Tracking the participant funnel from outreach through screening to enrollment, with reporting for site coordinators and trial sponsors.

Engagement and communication. Multi-channel communication with participants across the trial lifecycle, with the kind of cadence and touchpoint structure that retention research has shown actually moves drop-out rates.

Retention and adherence. Tools for keeping enrolled participants in the trial through the protocol, including the visit reminders, communication touchpoints, and operational workflow that site coordinators use to manage participant relationships.

Site and sponsor reporting. Dashboards and reporting for both trial sites (single-trial operational view) and trial sponsors (multi-site, cross-trial portfolio view).

The customer base spans academic medical centers (Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Penn State, U-M, and others) running investigator-initiated and federally funded trials, and biopharma sponsors (Cognito Therapeutics among the named references) running industry-sponsored trials.

Ann Arbor footprint

Ripple Science is headquartered in Ann Arbor and operates a focused team across product, engineering, customer success, and clinical operations expertise. The team is small relative to the broader Ann Arbor SaaS bench, consistent with a focused vertical SaaS company at growth stage.

The U-M Medical Campus proximity is operationally meaningful. Ann Arbor's clinical research footprint (Michigan Medicine, the U-M Clinical Trials Support Office, the U-M Institute for Clinical and Health Research) provides both an early-customer base and a recruiting pipeline of clinical operations talent. Ripple Science has been a recurring presence in U-M clinical research events.

Leadership and people

The company has been built around the founding team plus operators with backgrounds across clinical research and SaaS. Specific current titles and operating leadership should be verified on the Ripple Science website before citing in detail.

The clinical advisory bench has historically drawn from the academic medical center customer base. Senior clinical research operations leaders at Johns Hopkins, UCLA, U-M, and other partner institutions have served as advisors and product collaborators across the company's history, which is part of how Ripple Science has been able to design a product that maps to actual coordinator workflow rather than a generic SaaS interpretation of clinical operations.

The product engineering bench has grown out of the Ann Arbor SaaS labor market, with hires from the broader local engineering community. The combination of clinical operations expertise on the customer-facing side and SaaS product engineering on the build side is the central operating profile.

Why it matters

Three reasons Ripple Science matters in the Ann Arbor story.

First, it is one of the cleanest examples of an Ann Arbor SaaS company applied to a real clinical operations problem. Most Ann Arbor SaaS companies aim at horizontal use cases (CRM, customer experience, manufacturing analytics). Ripple Science is vertical, focused, and tied directly to the academic medical center economy that Ann Arbor sits at the center of.

Second, it overlaps strategically with the broader Ann Arbor clinical-stage biopharma cluster. ONL Therapeutics, Strata Oncology, and other Ann Arbor clinical and translational firms are exactly the kind of biopharma sponsor that Ripple Science's platform supports. That intra-cluster customer overlap is part of how Ann Arbor's biotech ecosystem strengthens as it matures.

Third, the academic medical center customer base is strategically defensible. Academic medical centers are slow-buying, sticky customers. Once a Johns Hopkins or UCLA has standardized on a clinical operations platform, the switching cost is high. Ripple Science's customer roster reflects a multi-year accumulation of those sticky relationships, which is the kind of moat that compounds over the long cycle of clinical trial operations.

Competitors and lineage

Ripple Science operates in a clinical trial technology category that includes Medidata (Dassault Systemes), Veeva Vault CTMS, Oracle Clinical One, Advarra, and a long tail of point solutions aimed at specific workflow slices. The large incumbents focus on trial management systems and electronic data capture, which is a different problem than participant recruitment and retention. That leaves an opening for a focused vendor that can integrate with the incumbents rather than replace them. Ripple Science's positioning sits squarely in that opening, oriented toward the recruitment and engagement workflow rather than the broader eCOA, EDC, or CTMS layer.

The lineage on Ripple Science is Ann Arbor native rather than U-M spinout. The founders did not come out of a specific faculty lab, but the company has built on the clinical research substrate that Michigan Medicine, the U-M Institute for Clinical and Health Research, and the broader Ann Arbor academic medical center ecosystem provide. That proximity to actual clinical trial operations is part of why the product positioning has held up well against West Coast competitors chasing the same category.

Hiring signal

The Ripple Science website (ripplescience.com/careers) is the best entry point for current open roles. Historically the team has hired across software engineering (full-stack, front-end, data), product management, customer success, and clinical operations expertise. The headcount sits in the focused-vertical-SaaS range; a mid-single-digit to low-double-digit engineering team with corresponding customer success and clinical operations staff is the typical shape of a company at this stage. Specific open requisition counts move month to month and should be verified on the careers page before relying on any number.

For engineers who want to build software against a well-defined industry problem rather than a horizontal SaaS use case, Ripple Science is the kind of Ann Arbor company that tends to retain senior talent. The customer-facing work is unusually substantive for a SaaS company of this size, which reflects the stakes involved when the downstream effect of a missed recruitment target is a delayed trial and a drug not getting to patients on schedule.

Ann Arbor connection

The reason Ripple Science is based in Ann Arbor rather than Boston or the Bay Area comes down to the same gravitational pull that shaped most of the city's SaaS bench. Michigan Medicine is one of the top-ten academic medical centers in the country by research volume, which means the company could pressure-test the product against real clinical operations from day one. The U-M Institute for Clinical and Health Research and the Clinical Trials Support Office both serve as early reference customers and recruiting channels. The broader Ann Arbor clinical research economy, including ArborMetrix, ONL Therapeutics, and Strata Oncology, provides a natural customer overlap and a talent pool that understands the trial-operations problem domain without needing to be retrained from scratch.

Related

  • ONL Therapeutics is the Ann Arbor clinical-stage biopharma whose operations exemplify the kind of biopharma sponsor that uses Ripple Science.
  • Strata Oncology is the Ann Arbor precision oncology network with overlapping clinical research operations needs.
  • ArborMetrix is the Ann Arbor real-world data company that intersects with Ripple Science on the broader clinical research data infrastructure.
  • Workit Health is the Ann Arbor telehealth SaaS whose clinical operations stack shares design patterns with Ripple Science.
  • Is Ann Arbor a tech hub? is the pillar essay that frames why the city's clinical-software bench is unusually deep.
  • The biotech category hub covers the broader Ann Arbor biotech bench.
  • The companies directory is the master index.

FAQ

Where is Ripple Science headquartered? Ripple Science is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

When was Ripple Science founded? 2016. The company was founded to address the long-standing operations problem in clinical trial recruitment, engagement, and retention.

What does Ripple Science do? Ripple Science builds a SaaS platform for clinical trial recruitment, engagement, and retention. The product handles participant tracking through the recruitment funnel, multi-channel communication across the trial lifecycle, retention workflow for keeping enrolled participants in the trial, and reporting for both sites and sponsors.

Who are Ripple Science's customers? Customers include academic medical centers (Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Penn State, University of Michigan, and others) and biopharma sponsors (Cognito Therapeutics among named references).

Why is clinical trial recruitment a problem worth solving? The plurality of clinical trials miss their enrollment targets. Failed recruitment cascades into extensions, additional sites, additional spend, and in the worst case abandoned programs. The economic and medical-innovation consequences are large enough that purpose-built software for the recruitment and retention workflow can produce measurable improvements in trial outcomes.

Is Ripple Science hiring in Ann Arbor? Yes. The team has historically hired across product, engineering, customer success, and clinical operations roles, with the Ann Arbor headquarters as the primary base. Check ripplescience.com/careers for current openings.

Footer note on sources: The ripplescience.com/careers URL is the best-guess public careers entry point; verify on the company site before citing specific open roles.

How does Ripple Science fit inside the broader Ann Arbor biotech ecosystem? Ripple Science sits at the intersection of two Ann Arbor strengths: SaaS engineering and academic clinical research. The customer base includes both academic medical centers (Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Penn State, U-M) and biopharma sponsors that overlap with the broader Ann Arbor and Michigan life sciences cluster. That cross-cluster positioning is part of how the company has built customer concentration in a category where most software providers struggle to land both academic and industry buyers.