Cori Clinical, an intelligence layer for accelerating clinical trials, has raised £3 million in a seed round led by Breega, with participation from Enzo, Heartfelt, Together Ventures and Bynd. The funding expands Cori Clinical’s capacity for delivery, supports team growth including the appointment of Chief Clinical Officer Emma Ogburn, and deepens the regulatory and clinical intelligence in Cori Clinical’s platform.
Clinical trials still rely on fragmented processes and disconnected sources of information, making it difficult for teams to apply relevant precedent and assess the implications of early design decisions. A 2026 Tufts CSDD study found that 76% of protocols are amended, with each substantial amendment carrying direct costs of around $141,000 for a Phase II protocol and $535,000 for Phase III, as well as longer recruitment and overall study durations. That is frustrating for clinical research organisations trying to run trials effectively and cost-efficiently, sponsors aiming to reach first participant in as quickly as possible, and patients waiting for new treatments that depend on a trial starting.
Cori Clinical is an AI workspace that brings together the knowledge an organisation has developed through years of clinical trial experience and combines it with external intelligence from clinical-trial registries, regulatory guidance and public sources, including the Food and Drug Administration, Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency and European Medicines Agency. Cori Clinical helps clinical teams turn an initial trial brief into a full protocol, submission package and operational plans built against current regulatory guidance. Rather than addressing a single document or workflow, Cori Clinical supports teams in building and maintaining a living blueprint for a feasible and executable trial, automatically incorporating new guidance into the workspace and flagging the risks and decisions that matter for a trial's success.
Based on internal modelling using average trial set-up costs, historical modification rates and time to first participant in, Cori Clinical estimates that its approach could reduce average trial set-up costs by at least 33%. By bringing inputs and decisions into one connected workspace, Cori Clinical is designed to reduce duplicated work and the risk of avoidable rework, cost and delay, while giving clinical teams greater visibility and control. In an internal evaluation benchmarked against amendments from completed trials, Cori Clinical’s AI reviewer flagged 82% of protocol errors classified as avoidable.
Cori Clinical is already working with 2 of the top 5 enterprise clinical research organisations globally and has customers across the clinical development ecosystem, including Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, where the platform supported two clinical trials in neurosurgery and neuro-oncology. Cori Clinical was founded by Jorn Jansen Schoonhoven, whose background spans AI and data science roles at Amazon and IBM, and Patricio Fernández, who led data science at Sanofi and AstraZeneca. Ogburn joins from Lindus Health, having previously helped reduce trial start-up timelines at Cancer Research UK and led the United Kingdom’s national urgent public health programme at the University of Oxford.
What normally takes us several months to draft - the protocol and Investigator Brochure - we completed in a matter of weeks. Beyond the speed, Cori has genuinely added value in the earliest stages of trial design, helping us pressure-test ideation and answer design questions we would otherwise have debated internally for far longer. For a unit running complex oncology and neurosurgery trials, that combination of speed, scientific rigour and responsiveness has added great value.
Clinical trials are built through a series of interconnected decisions about how a study should be designed and run. Today, much of the knowledge and precedent behind those decisions is scattered across previous trials, siloed teams, internal systems and separate 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.
Clinical trial start-up is a critical but often overlooked bottleneck in drug development, with months lost between designing a trial and enrolling the first patient. Cori is bringing the intelligence and connected workflows needed to make that process faster, and we’re excited to back Jorn, Patricio and Emma and the team as they bring this powerful capability to more trials.
Trial technology has changed little in the past two decades, but recent progress in AI and large language models has opened a compelling path forward in bringing greater efficiency to trials and their lead times. Cori Clinical brings clinical and regulatory intelligence into one connected workspace, while keeping expert judgement at the centre. I’m excited to help more teams put this approach into practice and reduce the time between a promising idea and a trial that is ready to start.
