A vehicle dynamics engineer who once tuned 700 horsepower supercars now wants to make clinical trial software as intuitive as opening a social media app. His story says as much about where the sector is heading as it does about one founder's pivot.

A change of gears

Paul Batten did not set out to work in clinical research. A mechanical engineer from Picton who grew up on a small farm and fell in love with cars early, he chased motorsport through rallying and racing before landing what he describes as the best possible plan B for a kid who wanted to be a racing driver. He joined Ford Performance Vehicles, then McLaren, working as a vehicle dynamics engineer and test driver in the road car division.

The turning point came not in a boardroom but on the side of a circuit. Sitting in a McLaren Artura, tuning its traction control between hot laps, Batten had what he calls a moment of awareness. "These cars are cool and all, but there is a bit more to life than this," he recalls thinking. A quiet intuition pointed him towards medicine, though he had no idea what that would look like.

Two personal events sharpened the instinct. His father, an asthmatic as a child, had battled a persistent cough for nine months until the right specialist and the right antibiotic finally cleared it, restoring his sleep, his exercise and his quality of life. Around the same time, Batten lost someone he knew to the opioid crisis. The contrast between medicine at its best and its most devastating became, in his words, a wake up call about what he might most meaningfully contribute. When COVID arrived and a friend's wife, a doctor, asked him to help run a telehealth trial, the pieces fell into place.

His path is unusual in its entrepreneurial bent, but the underlying story is one the sector knows well. Few people set out at university to become a regulatory affairs manager or a clinical research associate. Most arrive through passion, serendipity or a well-timed nudge, then discover a career they never knew existed. Batten simply arrived by way of the pit lane.

The problem he could not unsee

That first telehealth trial, run entirely online during lockdown, forced Batten to evaluate the available software for consent, logistics and electronic data capture. What he found surprised him. The tools worked, but they had been built, as he puts it, by an engineer for an engineer, with a database first and a user interface bolted on afterwards. The person who actually had to use the system at the end of the day had been forgotten.

Coming to the category with genuinely fresh eyes, Batten saw the gap clearly. The platforms were not intuitive, and they were expensive to learn, with training courses that ran to roughly ten thousand dollars and still left users struggling. His benchmark was deliberately consumer grade. He wanted something closer to the first time a person opens a social media account, where posting, commenting and uploading simply make sense without a manual.

Out of that conviction came Objectivo Data, a clinical trial management system (CTMS) and electronic data capture (EDC) provider that Batten and his team built from the ground up. The software is 21 CFR Part 11 compliant, with audit trails and electronic signatures, and the company is increasingly working across the trial master file (TMF) layer as well, bringing versioning and timestamps to the document structures that underpin a trial. Batten is candid about where the company sits in the competitive landscape. He positions Objectivo Data as the little Aussie cousin to global players such as Medrio and Veeva, competing not on scale but on usability and bespoke fit.

Designing for the driver, not the database

The clearest expression of Batten's philosophy is his approach to monitoring. Many systems, he argues, bury status information several clicks deep, forcing users to hunt through menus to learn what a participant is doing. Objectivo Data instead presents a true dashboard where participant statuses, alerts, source data verification and notifications sit together in one view.

He reaches, naturally, for an automotive analogy. A warning light in a car does not hide itself inside a sub menu waiting to be found; it appears in front of the driver in real time. Trial monitoring, he believes, should behave the same way.

The second pillar is customisation. Where larger vendors charge heavily for bespoke work, Objectivo Data treats custom forms, development and integrations as core business. Batten points to a recent veterinary trial in which the client needed a data form to match the Cambridge University standard used across comparable studies, down to an identical table layout. Replicating that with a major vendor, he notes, could cost tens of thousands of dollars. His team simply built it.

That same instinct is now driving the company's most ambitious project. Phase one clinics approached Objectivo Data with a problem no existing product seemed to solve: how to forecast and schedule a finite number of beds across overlapping trials, each with its own visits and cycles stretching out as far as twelve months, without discovering a conflict nine months out and finding a participant with nowhere to sleep. The team is building an immersive, drag and drop scheduling tool from scratch, organised around a single master chart so that the interface explains itself.

Three design principles run through the work:

• Intuitive by default. If a feature needs a costly training course to understand, the design has failed.

• Real time and visible. Critical information belongs on a single dashboard, not hidden behind menus.

• Custom as standard. Bespoke forms, integrations and tools are treated as the core offering, not an expensive extra.

  
  

Small team, fast laps

Objectivo Data is, for now, a team of three: two engineers and a marketing director, one Australian and one New Zealander. Both engineers are, fittingly, ex McLaren, a background Batten credits for the company's comfort with standing on hot coals and adapting quickly. Being small, he argues, is an advantage. The team can move fast, stay close to customer needs and reshape the product as it learns.

The architecture reflects that agility. The CTMS and the bed forecasting work are being built on a shared, modular framework, so that EDC can later be stitched in for clients who currently rely on a sponsor's system. The technical groundwork is laid now to make future expansion a matter of splicing rather than rebuilding.

Batten is equally clear eyed about the company's model. Objectivo Data is bootstrapped, and he has been living off his savings rather than chasing investment, a choice he openly questions but has stuck with so far. The discipline shows in where he sees the most meaningful opportunity. A growing part of the business involves supporting doctors and early stage biotech founders who hold seed funding and a ready pool of participants but lack the confidence to run the data side of a trial. By taking on that piece, and bringing in biostatistics support where needed, Objectivo Data lets these founders run their own studies rather than defaulting to a contract research organisation they may not yet be able to afford. Batten frames this, without overstatement, as a small contribution to democratising clinical research.

What it means for the sector

Batten's pivot sits inside a much larger shift. A great deal of entrepreneurial energy and capital is now flowing into the infrastructure around therapeutic products, the software, the consulting, the new CROs and the platforms, rather than into drugs, devices and diagnostics themselves. Consolidation and private equity interest in this services and technology layer have grown to a scale that, on some measures, dwarfs investment in the assets it supports. Founders like Batten are not adjacent to that story; they are part of it.

For anyone considering a similar move, his advice is refreshingly unglamorous. When the team tried cold calling, starting from a network of effectively zero, it went nowhere. What changed everything was showing up in person. Attending Bio in Boston was a financial stretch and well outside the comfort zone, but by the second day the conversations and introductions were flowing in a way no outreach campaign had managed.

His practical guidance for entrepreneurs eyeing the space:

• Go to conferences and be seen. Relationships are built face to face, and a handshake opens doors that cold outreach cannot.

• Tap the support around you. State representatives in jurisdictions such as New South Wales and Queensland can point founders towards programs and assistance, including help getting to key events.

• Invest in the room even when it stings. Paying your own way to the right conference can be the single biggest game changer for a young company.

• Lead with usability. A fresh, user first perspective can be a genuine differentiator in a category built largely for technical minds.

  
  

The road ahead

Batten hints at a grander vision still to be unveiled, but the through line is already visible. The same obsession that once shaved fractions of a second off a lap time is now aimed at the friction, complexity and cost that slow clinical trials down. The lesson for the sector is not that every founder should come from motorsport, but that progress often arrives when someone refuses to accept that the way things have always been built is the way they must stay.

For a profession that so often draws its talent from unexpected places, that may be the most familiar insight of all. The careers, and the companies, that reshape clinical research are rarely the ones that were planned. They are the ones built by people who noticed a problem they could not unsee, and decided to do something about it.