Convoke: Enabling more medicines to reach patients, faster
Drug development today is slower, riskier, and more expensive than it should be. It’s common for nearly half of a new drug’s development timeline to be spent outside of the lab in “white space”, where many biopharma teams & external consultants perform highly manual knowledge work like preparing regulatory documents, reviewing clinical results, and generally piecing together & summarizing scattered information. Every week of delay costs drug development companies millions of lost revenue and also means patients wait longer for treatments they urgently need. While drug discovery science has accelerated with breakthroughs like CRISPR & AlphaFold, the systems for turning those potential new discoveries into approved medicines remain outdated and bottlenecked by scarce expertise.
Convoke transforms how knowledge work in biopharma is done. Convoke’s general-purpose, AI-native platform unifies fragmented data, codifies decision logic, and generates high-stakes deliverables, such as competitive intelligence briefs or scientific manuscripts, in a fraction of the time it takes today. Already, customers are seeing significant results across functional areas. One biotech used Convoke to integrate internal experimental data with external datasets for thousands of potential drug candidates, cutting months of manual analysis to under a week and expanding its actionable opportunity pool by more than 50%. Another customer in medical affairs used Convoke’s research and report generation capabilities to accelerate the preparation of a regulatory submission by a month.
We’re thrilled to be partnering with Convoke in their seed funding round. Convoke was founded by Alex, Maged, and Vikas, a team with deep cross-industry expertise. Maged led data and AI products at Applied Intuition, which shares many parallels with Convoke’s vision to build the autonomy stack for “self-driving” biopharma companies. Vikas was a founding engineer at Commure, a healthcare AI company, and then an engineering leader at Applied Intuition. Alex brings a background in biopharma consulting and has shared his perspectives on the industry through widely read blog posts and podcasts. I first came across his work when one of his essays on why drugs have become harder to develop went viral, and I was struck by his clarity of thought and depth of knowledge. I reached out online, referencing a blog post of mine on how consulting will change as large language models improve, and we began a conversation. Alex’s unique earned insights, shaped by his time advising life sciences companies and his thoughtful explorations of drug discovery’s past and future, give Convoke a distinct advantage.
We believe Convoke is at the forefront of a profound shift in biopharma, where knowledge work is no longer a bottleneck but a competitive advantage. As rising global competition, funding constraints, and continued raising of the therapeutic bar put pressure on the industry, Convoke will help bring more medicines to market faster, at lower cost, and with greater precision. We were early backers of the last life sciences revolution, partnering with Genentech at formation. Now, at the dawn of the AI era, we’re thrilled to support Convoke as they lead the next wave of innovation.
— Leigh Marie