Convoke Raises $8.6M to Build the AI Operating System for Biopharma

Convoke's platform turns raw data into deliverables, helping drug developers accelerate the path from idea to market

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Aug. 19, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Convoke, the AI-native operating system for biopharma, announced it has raised $8.6 million in seed capital. This financing was led by Kleiner Perkins and Dimension Capital, with participation from ACME, Comma Capital, Liquid2, Not Boring Capital, Audacious, Lux Capital, and angels including Qasar Younis, Erik Torenberg, and other leaders in AI and biotechnology.

The funding comes as biopharma companies are under pressure to reduce development cycle times and improve efficiency. New drugs spend ~45% of their development time (5 or 6 years) on planning and preparation (so-called 'white space'), and each day of delay is $500,000 in lost sales and time patients are waiting for critical medicines.

"A surprising amount of time is lost to manual, repetitive, or burdensome tasks that could be automated with language model-based systems," said Alex Telford, CEO and co-founder of Convoke. "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."

Convoke serves as the "information factory" for biopharma knowledge work. Its platform takes in raw data and turns it into the finished work products that drive critical drug development decisions. Customers, from small biotechs to top 20 pharma teams across competitive intelligence, medical affairs, and portfolio strategy, use Convoke to:

• Bring all their information into one place: Ingest and structure internal files, proprietary databases, and external research into an ontology that's easy to search and reason over.
• Build automations on top of that data: Create custom agents and workflows that apply decision logic, perform analysis, and transform scattered data into the outputs teams need.
• Generate critical deliverables: From manuscripts and competitive intelligence briefs to submission-ready regulatory documents, Convoke's platform is built to fit industry workflows.

By codifying decision-making and automating repetitive, manual tasks, Convoke enables biopharma teams to complete work in-house that might otherwise require spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on outsourced vendors.

"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," said Leigh Marie Braswell, Partner at Kleiner Perkins. "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."

To date, Convoke has rapidly grown its customer base, as biopharma organizations look for ways to compete in a tighter, more global market. "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," said Nan Li, Managing Partner at Dimension. "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." By replacing these outdated workflows with automated processes, Convoke is already giving teams back significant time savings, which they can reinvest in getting life-saving medicines to patients faster.

Added Telford, "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."

About Convoke
Convoke is the AI-native operating system for biopharma companies, offering software tools that unify internal and external data, codify decision logic, and generate critical deliverables across the drug lifecycle, helping teams move from idea to market faster. Founded by Alex Telford, Maged Ahmed, and Vikas Velagapudi — veterans of the pharmaceutical industry, Applied Intuition, and early-stage healthtech — the company's platform has helped customers rapidly accomplish in-house what once required large teams or costly consultants.

The company has raised $8.6M to date from top investors including Kleiner Perkins, Dimension Capital, ACME, Comma Capital, Liquid2, Not Boring Capital, Audacious, Lux Capital, and angels including Qasar Younis, Erik Torenberg, and other leaders in AI and biotechnology.

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SOURCE Convoke Holdings, Inc.