Cori Clinical, a London-based startup that acts as the intelligence layer to accelerate clinical trials, has closed a €3.8 million Seed round led by Breega, with participation from Enzo, Heartfelt, Together Ventures, and Bynd.
The company plans to use this capital to expand delivery capacity; support team growth, including appointing Chief Clinical Officer Dr. Emma Ogburn, who joins from Lindus Health; and deepen the regulatory and clinical intelligence in Cori’s platform.
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.”
Founded in 2025 by Schoonhoven (CEO) and Patricio Fernández (CTO), Cori Clinical creates a living blueprint of a trial from initial idea through execution.
Its unified workspace turns a clinical team’s collective insight and organisational experience, coupled with trusted external intelligence, into a single, shared source for all clinical and commercial teams. It helps teams identify risks, assess options and connect study design with the practical requirements of running
According to the company, 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. It notes that getting those early decisions wrong is costly. In addition to the cost incurred, 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,” the startup mentioned in the press release.
Cori Clinical is an AI workspace which claims to bring 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)s, 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.
The company notes that it helps teams build and maintain a living blueprint for a feasible and executable trial, instead of addressing a single document or workflow,
As new guidance is published, the UK startup builds it into the workspace and flags the risks and decisions that matter for a trial’s success. This lets teams test proposed designs against their experience and the wider evidence base, identify risks, assess options, and link study-design decisions to 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%.
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”.
Cori Clinical is already working with 2 of the top 5 enterprise CROs globally. It 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.