The funding will support Cori Clinical’s product development, expand its delivery capacity and grow its clinical, engineering and commercial teams.
Cori Clinical, an AI platform for clinical trials, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Breega, with participation from Enzo, Heartfelt, Together Ventures and Bynd.
The company is targeting the fragmented processes and disconnected sources of information involved in designing and setting up clinical trials.
Cori was founded by Jorn Jansen Schoonhoven (CEO) and Patricio Fernández (CTO). The company has developed an AI workspace that brings together an organisation’s knowledge from previous clinical trials with external intelligence from trial registries, regulatory guidance and public sources, including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
The platform helps clinical teams turn an initial trial brief into a full protocol, submission package and operational plans based on current regulatory guidance. Rather than focusing on an individual document or workflow, Cori creates what the company describes as a “living blueprint” for a trial, allowing teams to assess proposed designs against previous experience and external evidence, identify risks and connect study-design decisions with budgets, timelines and operational plans.
Cori says this approach is designed to reduce duplicated work and avoidable rework, costs and delays while giving clinical teams greater visibility over trial planning.
Based on its internal modelling using average trial set-up costs, historical modification rates and time to first participant, Cori estimates that its approach could reduce average trial set-up costs by at least 33 per cent. In an internal evaluation benchmarked against amendments from completed trials, its AI reviewer identified 82 per cent of protocol errors classified as avoidable.
Cori is already working with two of the world’s five largest enterprise clinical research organisations (CROs). Its customers also include Erasmus MC, an academic medical centre and university hospital in Rotterdam, where the platform supported two clinical trials in neurosurgery and neuro-oncology.
Jansen Schoonhoven said that clinical trial design involves a series of connected decisions, but the knowledge informing them is often spread across previous studies, different teams, internal systems and documents.
Cori brings that intelligence together into a living blueprint, so teams can make better-informed decisions before avoidable problems become delays, so the science never waits on the process.
The team has also been joined by Dr Emma Ogburn as Chief Clinical Officer, bringing first-hand experience of addressing long clinical trial start-up timelines.
Cori will use the seed funding to expand its delivery capacity, grow its team and deepen the regulatory and clinical intelligence within its platform. The investment will also support the company as it builds on its existing customer traction and seeks to develop broader commercial relationships with CROs and pharmaceutical companies.