The London startup is betting that drug developers will pay to catch protocol mistakes before a trial starts instead of amending them at six-figure cost afterwards.
Cori Clinical, a London startup building AI software for designing clinical trials, has raised a $4m seed round led by Breega. Enzo Ventures, Heartfelt, Together Ventures and Bynd also took part in the round, which was announced on 7 October.
The company sells a workspace that pulls together a client’s own knowledge from past trials with outside sources, including trial registries and guidance from the FDA in the US, the UK’s MHRA and the European Medicines Agency. Teams use it to turn a trial brief into a full protocol (the document that sets out how a study will be run), a submission package and operational plans, and to test a proposed design against earlier studies and regulator guidance before it is locked in.
Cori said the funding will go on expanding delivery capacity, growing the team and deepening the regulatory and clinical intelligence built into the platform. Part of that hiring has already happened: Dr Emma Ogburn has joined as chief clinical officer from Lindus Health, the London clinical trials company.
The startup was founded by chief executive Jorn Jansen Schoonhoven, who previously worked on AI and data science at Amazon and IBM, and chief technology officer Patricio Fernández, who led data science teams at Sanofi and AstraZeneca. It says it is working with two of the world’s five largest enterprise contract research organisations, the outsourcing firms that run trials for drug companies, though it has not named them. Its one named customer is Erasmus MC, the Rotterdam academic medical centre, where the platform supported two trials in neurosurgery and neuro-oncology.
The headline claims come with a caveat. Cori estimates it could cut average trial set-up costs by at least 33%, and says its AI reviewer flagged 82% of protocol errors classed as avoidable when tested against amendments from completed trials. Both figures come from the company’s own modelling and evaluation and have not been independently validated.
The problem it is chasing is well documented. Research by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, cited by the company, found that 76% of protocols are amended at least once, with a substantial amendment costing about $141,000 for a Phase II trial and $535,000 at Phase III.
“Clinical trials are built through a series of interconnected decisions about how a study should be designed and run,” said Jansen Schoonhoven.
Matthieu Vallin, partner at Breega, called trial start-up “a critical but often overlooked bottleneck in drug development”.
The valuation was not disclosed. Cori now has to turn early work with large research organisations into named, paying contracts, in a field where better-funded UK rivals such as Lindus Health are already established.
