Healthtech startup Cori Clinical raises £3m led by Breega and Enzo Ventures
This article covers Cori Clinical, a healthtech startup, which has raised £3m in a seed funding round to accelerate development of its AI-powered workspace for clinical trial design. The funding is intended to expand delivery capacity, grow the team and deepen the platform's regulatory and clinical intelligence to help clinical research organisations and pharmaceutical sponsors convert pilot interest into commercial contracts.
Cori Clinical, a healthtech startup, has raised £3m in a seed funding round to accelerate development of its AI-powered workspace for clinical trial design. The capital will expand delivery capacity, grow the team — including the appointment of Chief Clinical Officer Dr Emma Ogburn — and deepen the platform’s regulatory and clinical intelligence to help convert interest from clinical research organisations and pharmaceutical sponsors into commercial contracts.
Why it matters
Clinical trials routinely suffer costly delays and late-stage changes. A 2026 Tufts CSDD study found 76% of protocols are amended; each substantial amendment can add roughly £106,000 for a Phase II protocol and £403,000 for Phase III. Amendments are also associated with longer recruitment and overall study durations. That translates into higher operational costs for CROs and sponsors and more time before patients can access new treatments.
Tools that reduce avoidable rework at protocol design and build quicker, more robust submission packages could therefore cut substantial time and cost from drug development. Cori’s funding is notable because it targets that start-up bottleneck rather than downstream trial execution.
Inside the product
Cori provides a unified AI workspace that assembles an organisation’s own trial knowledge alongside public and regulatory sources — clinical trial registries and guidance from the FDA, MHRA and EMA — into a “living blueprint” for a trial. The platform aims to convert an initial brief into a protocol, submission package and operational plans while keeping teams aware of regulatory changes and risk trade-offs.
Rather than treating a protocol as a single document, Cori links design decisions to budgets, timelines and operational tasks so teams can pressure-test options and surface avoidable risks before they become amendments. Internal modelling cited by the company estimates at least a 33% reduction in average trial set-up costs. In an internal evaluation, Cori’s AI reviewer flagged 82% of protocol errors that had previously been classified as avoidable.
Cori already works with two of the top five global enterprise CROs and has academic customers such as Erasmus MC, which used the platform to support two neurosurgery and neuro-oncology trials.
In the announcement, 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.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Breega, with participation from Enzo Ventures. The funding is positioned to help Cori deepen its regulatory and clinical capabilities and to move pilot interest from CROs and pharma into larger commercial relationships.
In the announcement, Matthieu Vallin, Partner at Breega, 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.
In the announcement, Edgar Vicente, Founding Partner at Enzo Ventures, said:
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.
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Founder perspective
Cori was founded by Jorn Jansen Schoonhoven (CEO) and Patricio Fernández (CTO). Jorn’s background includes AI and data science roles at Amazon and IBM, spanning supply-chain systems, robotics and life-sciences applications. Patricio led data science teams at Sanofi and AstraZeneca.
In the announcement, 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.
The company has also appointed Dr Emma Ogburn as Chief Clinical Officer. Her CV includes roles at Cancer Research UK, where she shortened timelines for bringing investigational products into trials by about a third, and at the University of Oxford, where she led the national urgent public health programme and helped deliver COVID-19 trials to more than 41,000 patients with trial start-up reduced to two weeks. She later helped scale Lindus Health into a global tech-enabled CRO.
In the announcement, Dr Emma Ogburn said:
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.
The bigger picture
Cori’s approach fits a broader shift toward structured, machine-readable systems for trial information and the growing use of AI to surface precedent and regulatory context. Tools that reduce amendments and speed time to first patient address a persistent pain point across clinical development, from academic centres to large CROs and sponsors.
The deal also signals continued momentum among healthtech investors for startups that tackle early-stage trial inefficiencies rather than later-stage recruitment or monitoring problems.
This funding round arrives as UK and European regulators increasingly publish guidance on complex trials and digital methods. If Cori’s workspace can consistently lower set-up costs and avoidable amendments in live programmes, it may become a common layer in how trials are designed and delivered across the region.
They've invested in Cori Clinical
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| Investors | Investment Focus | Startup Investments | Round Size | Connect |
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