Derk Arts

Founder & CEO Castor (Castor EDC)

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Dr Derk Arts is a physician-researcher who founded Castor in 2012 because he had personally run into the bottleneck it exists to remove. Clinical research generates its evidence from data that is, in practice, captured by hand, entered twice, held in systems that do not talk to each other, and cleaned over months — work that delays results without improving them. Castor is a clinical trial data platform for medical device, biopharma, diagnostics and academic research teams, built so that data can be captured, standardised and integrated from any source. It has now supported more than 17,000 studies for over 500 companies across more than 170 countries, covering some 8 million patients, and has moved beyond conventional electronic data capture into AI-assisted extraction with human review. Arts holds both a medical degree and a doctorate, which gives him unusual standing with the researchers who use the product, and he has surrounded the company with senior industry governance — Frans van Houten, the former chief executive of Philips, chairs its board.

Career Highlights

• Founded Castor in 2012 while working as a physician-researcher, in direct response to the manual and fragmented state of clinical research data handling.
• Built a platform supporting more than 17,000 studies for over 500 companies in more than 170 countries, with 223,000-plus users and data covering around 8 million patients.
• Launched Catalyst, an AI-assisted data extraction capability with human review, extending Castor beyond electronic data capture.
• Grew the company to a headcount in the 251 to 500 range from an Amsterdam base.
• Raised successive rounds through Series B, with Eight Roads Ventures and F-Prime Capital among the leads.
• Recruited Frans van Houten, former Philips chief executive, as board chairman.
• Assembled an executive team drawn from Medidata Solutions, Siemens Healthcare and global contract research organisations.

Professional Journey

Arts trained in medicine and went on to complete a doctorate, working as a physician-researcher — a role in which he was both a clinician and a generator of research data. That combination matters to the company he built. Most clinical research software is designed by people who have read about the workflow; Arts had lived inside it, including at GGZ inGeest, a Dutch mental health institution, until 2012.

The frustration that produced Castor is specific and well documented in the company’s own account of itself: research teams spend a disproportionate share of a study’s timeline on manual data handling, reconciling fragmented systems, and getting data into a shape where it can be analysed at all. Every week of that is a week between a treatment working and anyone being able to demonstrate that it works. Castor’s stated mission is framed in exactly those terms — getting research teams from data to evidence with less manual work, so treatments reach patients sooner.

He founded the company in 2012 and built it around electronic data capture, with an emphasis on standardisation and integration from any source rather than on locking data into one system. That positioning found a broad market: not only biopharma and medical device sponsors but diagnostics companies and, importantly, academic research teams, who are chronically underserved by enterprise clinical trial software priced for large sponsors. The scale reached is substantial — over 500 companies, more than 17,000 studies, more than 170 countries and roughly 8 million patients’ worth of data.

More recently the company has extended into AI. Catalyst applies AI-assisted extraction with a human reviewer in the loop, aimed at the specific manual work of pulling structured data out of source documents — the step that consumes the most time and introduces the most error in conventional trial operations. Keeping human review in the design is a considered choice in a regulated setting, where an unreviewed model output is not an acceptable basis for a regulatory submission.

Castor has funded that growth through successive rounds up to a Series B, with Eight Roads Ventures and F-Prime Capital among the lead investors, and grown to a headcount in the low hundreds from its Amsterdam base. Arts has paired that with senior governance and an experienced executive bench — a chief financial officer who came through Medidata Solutions and Siemens Healthcare, a chief product officer with a decade in eClinical technology and a doctorate in biological chemistry, a chief operating officer with two decades running global clinical research organisations, and Frans van Houten, who led Philips through its transformation into a health technology business, as chairman of the board.

Education

Dr Arts holds both a medical degree and a doctorate, and is consistently styled with both by Castor and in third-party coverage. However, no public source found today names the awarding institution, the field of his doctorate, or the years of either qualification, and no institution is asserted here rather than guessed at.