The funding will expand Cori's capacity for delivery; support the growth of the team, including the appointment of Chief Clinical Officer Dr Emma Ogburn, who joins from Lindus Health; and deepen the regulatory and clinical intelligence in Cori's platform. It will also enable Cori to build on its customer traction and convert growing interest from clinical research organisations (CROs) and pharmaceutical companies into deeper and broader commercial relationships.
Clinical trials still rely on fragmented processes and disconnected sources of information, making it difficult for teams to apply relevant precedent and assess the wider implications of early design decisions. The cost of getting those early decisions wrong is significant: 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. Amended protocols were also associated with longer recruitment and overall study durations.
That is frustrating for everyone involved: CROs trying to run trials effectively and cost-efficiently; sponsors trying to reach 'first participant in' as quickly as possible; and, most importantly, patients waiting for new treatments that depend on a trial starting.
Cori Clinical is an AI workspace which 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 (FDA), the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Cori 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 helps teams build and maintain a living blueprint for a feasible and executable trial. As new guidance is published, Cori builds it into the workspace and flags the risks and decisions that matter for a trial's success. This enables teams to test proposed designs against both their own experience and the wider evidence base, identify risks, assess options and connect study-design decisions with budgets, timelines and operational plans.
Based on internal modelling using average trial set-up costs, historical modification rates and time to 'first participant in', Cori estimates that its approach could reduce average trial set-up costs by at least 33%. By bringing these inputs and decisions into one connected workspace, Cori 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's AI reviewer flagged 82% of protocol errors classified as avoidable.
Cori Clinical is already working with 2 of the top 5 enterprise CROs globally. In addition, Cori has customers across the clinical development ecosystem, including Erasmus MC, an academic medical centre and university hospital in Rotterdam, where the Cori platform supported two clinical trials in neurosurgery and neuro-oncology.
Dr Judith Verhagen-Oldenampsen, Research Coordinator, Neurosurgery Dept, Erasmus MC, said: “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.”
Jorn Jansen Schoonhoven, Co-Founder and CEO of Cori Clinical, said: “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.”
Matthieu Vallin, Partner at Breega, which led the funding round, said: “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.”
Edgar Vicente, Founding Partner at Enzo Ventures, added: “Clinical trials are moving from fragmented documents to structured, machine-readable systems. Cori is building the source of truth underneath that shift, led by a team that has lived the pain firsthand and has exceptional founder-market fit. We believe they can become a core infrastructure layer for how trials are designed and run.”
Dr Emma Ogburn, who joins the Cori Clinical team as Chief Clinical Officer, has seen the problem of long trial start-up timelines first-hand. At Cancer Research UK, she helped bring new investigational products for blood cancers into clinical trials faster, reducing a six-month timeline by one-third. At the University of Oxford, she led the UK's national urgent public health programme, helping deliver trials of potential COVID-19 treatments to more than 41,000 patients, with trial start-up reduced to two weeks while maintaining regulatory compliance. After Oxford, Emma went on to scale Lindus Health from the ground up, resulting in a global tech-enabled CRO, where she was able to significantly compress trial timeframes across the entire trial lifecycle.
Dr Ogburn says: “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.”
Cori was founded by Jorn Jansen Schoonhoven (CEO) and Patricio Fernández (CTO). Jorn's background spans AI and data science, including roles at Amazon and IBM working on supply-chain systems, robotics and life-sciences applications. Patricio brings experience from the pharmaceutical industry, where he led data science at both Sanofi and AstraZeneca.
About Cori Clinical
Behind every clinical trial that starts late, a patient is waiting for a treatment.
Cori Clinical is the intelligence layer for accelerating clinical trials, creating a living blueprint of a trial from initial idea through to execution. Its unified workspace turns a clinical team's collective insight and organisational experience, enriched with trusted external intelligence, to help teams identify risks, assess options and connect study design with the practical requirements of running a trial.
Cori surfaces and structures the evidence, while clinical teams retain responsibility for judgement and approval. Less time is lost to reconciling data, documents and version conflicts, so more time is available for the decisions that move a trial forward.
No patient should have to wait when the science is ready but the process is too slow.
