Sol Chen

She studied at Brown University. Built In Boston’s 2017 article says she was earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics there; OneSchema’s 2025 team introduction says she studied computer science, mathematics and economics at Brown University and left to start Clara Health.⁠[1][2]

OneSchema’s team introduction says that before Clara Health she did research in theoretical mathematics at Boston College, in computational genomics at the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry, and in computer vision at the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry.⁠[2]

While walking across the Brown University campus she saw, on a telephone pole, a flyer seeking breast cancer patients for a clinical trial, which led her to want an online alternative. She says she discovered the problem “by total accident.”⁠[1][3][4]

M&B Sciences’ press release announcing its acquisition of Clara Health says that Evan Ehrenberg and Sol Chen co-founded Clara Health in 2015 and that the company was created from a collaboration with patient advocates; Built In Boston writes that by 2016 she and co-founder Evan Ehrenberg had formed Clara Health. BIOS Community’s 2020 founder spotlight says that she started Clara Health and that Evan Ehrenberg joined afterwards; it records that Ehrenberg graduated from the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry at 14, began a PhD in computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and took a leave of absence to work at PalantirPalantirPalantir is a U.S. enterprise software company founded in 2003 that provides data and artificial intelligence platforms including Gotham, Foundry, Palantir Apollo, and AIP, serving government and commercial organizations. The company went public through a direct listing in 2020 and now trades on Nasdaq under the ticker PLTR.Open the full entry as a product manager.⁠[5][1][3]

The Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio) wrote in 2017 that Clara Health was formerly called Xperii. Profiles In Entrepreneurship’s 2019 profile says that she and her co-founder came from regulated technology industries; that in its first year the company was funded mainly by free money from accelerators and pitch competitions, with its first checks coming from the student-founder funds Rough Draft Ventures and Dorm Room Fund; and that the company, then based in Boston, began fundraising there, but the founders felt that investors there were in general overly focused on intellectual-property differentiation and short-term exits; widening their outreach, they found Silicon Valley investors more aligned with their vision.⁠[6][4]

In the summer of 2016 she and Evan Ehrenberg went through MassCONNECT, which MassBio describes as its two-month mentorship program matching entrepreneurs with seasoned life sciences professionals.⁠[6]

On June 16, 2017 the Thiel Foundation named the 25 members of the 2017 class of Thiel Fellows, and she was among them. The announcement states that the two-year Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry provides young entrepreneurs with $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology entrepreneurs, and that the fellows were selected from thousands of applications from around the world. The list gives her as from Cambridge, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry, with the project “Clara” in the field “Health Technology,” and describes her: “Sol founded Clara, which is building a platform to support patients throughout the clinical trial process, from identification to enrollment and beyond.”⁠[7][7]

BIOS Community’s spotlight says she took the Thiel Fellowship to start Clara Health; the Profiles In Entrepreneurship profile and OneSchema’s team introduction also describe her as a Thiel Fellow.⁠[3][4][2]

In November 2017 she and Evan Ehrenberg, as co-founders of Clara Health, were named to ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry’ 2018 “30 Under 30” Healthcare list. Forbes’ write-up says that one of the biggest costs in drug development is finding patients for clinical trials and that Sol Chen and Evan Ehrenberg’s Clara Health is working to streamline the process, “like a Match.com for patients and experimental treatments.” MassBio wrote that they were two of the three MassCONNECT graduates on that year’s list.⁠[8][6][1]

Built In Boston wrote in December 2017 that Clara Health is a centralized online platform, free for patients, that houses every current study in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry and abroad; after a match, the company offers “white-glove service,” including guides on stress, trial payments, insurance and travel, and it also helps researchers at hospitals, universities and pharmaceutical companies recruit patients. The article says that Clara Health, still in its first year of operation, had been named a finalist for the SCOPE Patient Engagement Award and Fierce Pharma’s Digital Health Innovation Awards.⁠[1]

Northeastern University wrote in March 2018 that Clara Health’s backers included Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry, Eventbrite founder Kevin Hartz, former GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry executive Adrian Aoun, and Nicolas Berggruen; the company initially focused on autoimmune disorders, was free for patients, and had pharmaceutical and biotech companies as paying clients. Lilly Stairs, a Northeastern graduate, was its head of patient advocacy.⁠[9]

In June 2019 a Profiles In Entrepreneurship profile described her as co-founder and president of Clara Health. She set out three criteria for choosing investors: understanding of and conviction about the market, a similar vision for the company and entrepreneurial empathy from prior operator or founder experience, and concrete added value both immediately and in the long term. The profile says that Clara Health’s long-term aim was to move from an information-aggregator model to a managed-marketplace model. She sees the main value of AI in healthcare as augmenting rather than replacing physicians, “making every 5 minutes of a physician’s time count for 500.”⁠[4]

In April 2020 Clara Health, then based in San Francisco, announced an $11 million round led by Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry and launched World Without COVID, a free public health initiative connecting people with COVID-19 clinical trials, including vaccine, treatment, antibody testing and blood plasma transfusion studies; its database listed more than 300 COVID-19 trials, automatically updated every day from data pulled from clinicaltrials.gov and other sources. Evan Ehrenberg was then co-founder and chief executive; Drug Discovery and Development writes that Clara Health’s investors included Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund and that it had patient and medical support from people at institutions including UCSF, Takeda and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.⁠[10][11]

M&B Sciences, which describes itself as a fast-growing, technology-driven and African-American-owned clinical research organization, announced in a release datelined San Diego, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, that it had completed the acquisition of San Francisco-based Clara Health on March 1, 2022, with financial terms not disclosed; the combined company would operate as M&B Sciences and planned to integrate Clara Health’s Clara Platform with the NeighborhoodTrials platform. The release says that Clara Health had served more than thirty biotech and pharmaceutical clients and that its platform had expanded to protocol design, site selection and retention.⁠[5]

On January 27, 2025 OneSchema, a company that automates the ingestion, normalization and validation of client data, published a team introduction by its co-founder and chief executive Andrew Luo that lists her under Operations, noting that she had received the Forbes 30 Under 30 award and the Thiel Fellowship and that Clara Health had been backed by Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and top angel investors.⁠[2]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sol-chen/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

OneSchema: Official website: https://www.oneschema.co/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]