By Steve Herne, CEO of Unlearn

Looking back at 2025, I’m reminded of a conversation from February that has stayed with me. A CEO pulled me aside at a conference and said, ‘Steve, when we began working together last year, I was excited, but I’ll admit, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I kept those doubts to myself. But seeing Unlearn’s impact on our program, and how your work helped us make genuinely life-changing decisions for patients, was extraordinary. It proved to me that AI in clinical development truly moves the needle.”

That moment? That's what this year was about.

Real Partners, Real Progress

We're ending 2025 with the most customers in our history—a testament to our evolution from a forward-looking AI research company into one delivering real, measurable value in clinical development today. Sponsors are trusting us with their most important programs, and the conversations I’m having now are very different from even six months ago. They’re not asking “Does this work?” anymore. They’re asking “How fast can we implement this?” and “What else can we do together?”

One of the clearest signals of our progress is seeing sponsors return to work with us again—often expanding into additional programs and therapeutic areas. As teams experience the value of our AI-powered solutions, they start rethinking how they approach upcoming trials. That shift from skepticism to urgency tells me everything about where we're headed.

The Evidence Is In (And It's Good)

A standout moment this year came at AD/PD Vienna, where AbbVie shared a retrospective analysis showing how digital twins could reduce placebo arm size by 23% in Alzheimer’s disease. We also presented our own work in Parkinson’s disease, demonstrating a 38% reduction in control arm size for the same endpoint. These kinds of reductions directly translate into stronger evidence teams rely on to make high-stakes decisions.

Our Science team has been on fire this year—presenting at over twenty conferences, advancing our ML methods, and laying the groundwork for our expansion into oncology next year. When you watch a room of scientists lean in as our team presents, you know we’re building something that resonates.

Building the Team to Get Us There

If you want to know what I'm most proud of this year, it's the team we've assembled.

We welcomed Krates Ng as CTO—someone who knows how to build systems that scale. Kwame Marfo came on as VP of Product whose 15 years in life sciences product leadership give us a powerful lens on what customers need. And Dr. Robert Lenz joined as senior advisor—when someone who's run 130+ clinical studies across 50 countries tells you your approach is the right one, you pay attention. 

2026: A Defining Year Ahead 

After 30 years in this industry, you learn to recognize inflection points—the moments when meaningful change becomes possible. We’re entering one of those moments now.

Clinical development has never been more complex or more expensive. But with that complexity comes opportunity for teams willing to rethink how evidence is generated, how decisions are made, and how quickly new therapies can move forward. We’re not here to make trials 5% more efficient. We’re here to help teams design smarter studies, align more quickly, and make decisions with greater clarity and confidence.

Everything we built in 2025—the science, the technology, the team—is setting the stage for what comes next.

To everyone at Unlearn: Thank you for bringing your best every single day. Thank you for believing in this mission when many said it couldn't be done. And thank you for making this the most exciting chapter of my career.

Let's keep building.