Samuel Whitaker

Founder & CEO Mural Health

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Samuel Whitaker — known publicly as Sam Whitaker — is the founder and chief executive of Mural Health, a Berwyn, Pennsylvania company building participant-facing technology for clinical trials. The problem it addresses is one the industry has historically treated as administrative overhead: a trial participant may travel for hours to a site, incur costs, and then wait weeks for reimbursement by cheque, while the sponsor optimises everything else in the study. Mural Health’s platform, Mural Link, handles participant payments, integrates transport, carries secure two-way messaging between sites and participants, and collects real-time feedback. Whitaker is doing this for the second time. At Greenphire, which he founded, he commercialised ClinCard — the first electronic participant-payment product the clinical trial industry had — and built the company to a reported valuation above $1 billion on $2.2 million of outside capital.

Career Highlights

• Founded Greenphire and invented and commercialised ClinCard, creating the clinical-trial participant-payment category.
• Grew Greenphire over roughly thirteen years to a reported valuation of more than $1 billion, having raised only $2.2 million from investors — an unusually capital-efficient outcome for a healthcare software company.
• Co-founded Mural Health in January 2022 with Jason Dong and Shawn Milochik, initially serving as co-chief executive.
• Raised $8 million in seed funding in September 2023 led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Virtue VC, Operator Partners, Arkitect Ventures, Correlation Ventures and Project Mayhem Ventures participating; total disclosed funding since has been reported at around $20.7 million.
• Extended Mural Link’s payment rails to locally trusted methods — mobile wallets and local bank transfers — in underserved markets including Latin America, Ukraine and China, announced in February 2026.
• Earlier served as Vice President of the Prepaid Card Division at Citigroup, the payments background the ClinCard product drew on.

Professional Journey

Whitaker’s career sits at the intersection of two fields that rarely meet: consumer payments and clinical research. He came from the payments side, as a vice president in Citigroup’s prepaid card division, and carried into clinical trials an assumption ordinary in retail finance and almost absent from research operations — that the person receiving money should get it immediately, on a card or into an account they already use.

Greenphire was built on that. ClinCard gave trial sites a way to reimburse participants electronically at the visit rather than reimbursing them by cheque weeks later, and to reconcile those payments back to the sponsor and the study budget automatically. The product created a category; Greenphire went on to serve trials globally, and Technical.ly reports it reached a valuation above $1 billion having raised only $2.2 million in outside investment over roughly thirteen years. That combination — category creation with almost no dilution — is rare enough to explain why the second company was straightforwardly fundable.

Mural Health was founded in January 2022, with Jason Dong and Shawn Milochik, and Whitaker has said his motivation differed from what drove him to start Greenphire. The first company solved a payments problem inside a research workflow. The second starts from the participant: Mural Link treats payment as one element of a participant experience that also includes getting to the site, knowing what is happening, and being able to say when something is not working. Transport is integrated directly, including through an Uber integration; messaging is two-way and secure; feedback is collected in real time so that retention problems surface while a study is running rather than in its post-mortem. Bessemer Venture Partners led an $8 million seed round in September 2023 on that thesis.

The most recent phase has been geographic. Global trial payment infrastructure has tended to assume card networks and banking arrangements that do not match how people actually hold and move money in much of the world. In February 2026 Mural Health announced local payment methods — mobile wallets, local bank transfers — for markets including Latin America, Ukraine and China, with Whitaker framing it as a response to sites and sponsors telling the company that standard global payment partners did not meet local needs. It is a direct continuation of the original insight, applied where the friction is now greatest.

Education

University of Pennsylvania

Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy

This degree is carried forward from the prior record and could not be independently corroborated in any source consulted in this pass.