Convoke, an innovative AI-native operating system tailored specifically for the biopharma sector, has successfully secured $8.6 million in seed capital to accelerate its growth and technological development. This financing round was led by the well-established venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Dimension Capital, with additional investments from various other firms, including ACME, Comma Capital, Liquid2, Not Boring Capital, Audacious, and Lux Capital. Noteworthy angel investors include prominent figures such as Qasar Younis and Erik Torenberg, alongside other influential leaders in both artificial intelligence and biotechnology.
The funding is underscored by the growing pressures biopharma companies face in an increasingly competitive landscape. These organizations are tasked with the critical challenge of minimizing the lengthy development cycle times associated with bringing new drugs to market—currently averaging 5 to 6 years.
Convoke operates as an “information factory” for knowledge work within the biopharma industry. Convoke’s advanced platform is designed to seamlessly convert raw data into polished, actionable work products that are critical for informed drug development decisions. Its diverse clientele includes not only emerging small biotech enterprises but also established teams within the top 20 pharmaceutical companies. These organizations leverage Convoke for purposes such as competitive intelligence, medical affairs, and portfolio strategy, benefiting from its comprehensive features:
- Centralized Information Management: Convoke provides a robust system for ingesting and structuring a wide array of information sources, including internal files, proprietary databases, and external research. This data is organized into an easy-to-navigate ontology, enhancing searchability and accessibility.
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Automation Development: Users can design custom agents and workflows that incorporate specific decision logic and perform detailed analyses. This enables teams to transform fragmented data into well-defined outputs that meet their operational needs.
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Critical Deliverable Generation: The platform is engineered to support industry-standard workflows by generating vital documents such as manuscripts, competitive intelligence reports, and submission-ready regulatory documents. This capability enables teams to effectively communicate their research and findings while complying with regulatory requirements.
By streamlining decision-making processes and automating repetitive manual tasks, Convoke empowers biopharma teams to accomplish work internally that would typically require substantial financial resources when outsourced, potentially running into hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.
To date, Convoke has experienced rapid growth in its customer base as biopharma organizations actively seek strategies to gain a competitive edge in a tightening and increasingly global marketplace.
By transforming these antiquated processes into streamlined automated systems, Convoke not only offers significant time savings for its users but also enables them to reinvest that time in crucial activities aimed at expediting the delivery of life-saving medicines to patients who need them urgently.
KEY QUOTES:
“A surprising amount of time is lost to manual, repetitive, or burdensome tasks that could be automated with language model-based systems. Our goal with Convoke is to build software that applies recent advances in AI to unlock capacity and increase the ‘clock speed’ of biopharma organizations.”
“Every automation we build brings us closer to a world of truly ‘self-driving’ biopharma organizations, and we’re excited to see what our customers achieve with their extra time.”
Alex Telford, CEO and co-founder of Convoke
“The pace of scientific and technological development in life science has never been greater, but the industry faces stiff competition from China, a shifting regulatory environment, and challenging capital markets that demand that companies do more with less. Today’s biotechs need to be laser focused on making the right pipeline decisions and driving efficiency in internal processes. The agentic software that Convoke develops allows companies to shift towards a model where one person acts as a ‘manager of software systems’ instead of relying on sheer headcount and manual workflows.”
Nan Li, Managing Partner at Dimension
“The pharmaceutical industry faces enormous pressure to get more medicines to patients as fast as possible, all while operating in one of the most complex, regulated environments in the world. From our first conversation, it was clear that the Convoke team was building with both deep domain expertise and the technical ambition to redefine how biopharma knowledge work gets done. Their platform has already shown it can unlock capabilities for teams that would have been unimaginable even a year ago, and we’re excited to see them bring this new era of AI-native workflows to life sciences.”
Leigh Marie Braswell, Partner at Kleiner Perkins
