Convoke raises $8.6M seed from Kleiner Perkins to automate drug development planning with AI

that's crazy. Uh Jordy, anything else or should we let Derrick go?

No, this is great.

Thank you so much for hopping on. Uh congrats on all the progress and the growth. We will talk to you soon. and have a great rest of your day.

Great to meet you, Dick.

Talk to you soon. Congrats. Bye. Up next, we have Alex from Convoke coming in the studio into the TBPN Ultradome. Oh, okay. I'm handing over the mallet. My turn.

Give us an introduction.

What's happening?

What's your name? What do you do?

Great to be here.

I'm Alex. I'm founders of Convoke.

Got any news for us?

And we're we're Can you hear me?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, I'm one of the founders of Convoke. We're building a platform to automate knowledge work required to take drugs from an idea to a product that patients can use. So today we're announcing our 8.6 million seed raises.

It's from uh Lee Marie at Kleiner Perkins and Lee Marie the goat.

Yeah, the goat. That's my

Kleiner Perkins Rand Brazwell.

Yeah.

Yeah. We're trying to rename the firm.

Amazing.

Congrats. That's amazing.

Give us a quick history the company what you were doing before this and uh yeah how you got here.

Yeah. So before I was a life science consultant. So worked with pharma companies

on all sorts of drug development tasks a lot of like information synthesis.

Are you the one that comes up with the crazy drug names? I feel like every drug name

I actually did do one drug name project. Yeah, I did do one.

Can you tell us the name that you came up with? Uh

I cannot tell you. I cannot tell you. We had to test it with patients and everything and it was we were pretty happy.

He could tell us but he'd have to kill us.

Exactly. Exactly.

Anyway, um yeah. And and so where where have you taken the business now? Give us this the the latest and greatest. Yeah. So we're building an it's like an AI workspace. So our goal is to really automate um like a significant amount of knowledge work required like if you start from

um if if you think about like what it takes to take a drug to market, you have to do a combination of planning work and execution work and execution work is like clinical trials, running experiments.

Um that's where a lot of the focus is. That's where a lot of people kind of put the bottlenecks. Um, and what we're doing is kind of focused on the the other part of that process, the planning and preparation work. So that takes like 45% of the time of a drug's life cycle. And really, if you can speed that up, help companies make better decisions uh in how they synthesize information, search information, prepare regulatory documents faster, there actually is a potential to really accelerate um time from that it takes to take to market.

What's your read? Is this about uh replacing human labor or just making human labor dramatically more efficient?

It's more the latter. Um the way we see it is there are so many questions in biotech that are just intractable for humans to uh to solve alone. Like the search space for making a new drug is so large, you just cannot do it with humans. There's 20,000 or something proteins in the human proteome. If you want to make a drug against any one of those proteins, um, you know, if you want to do it like really thoroughly, you have to read all the literature on every single protein. You'd have to think about all the different ways you could drug every different protein, different combinations of drugs. That's just completely intractable search problem. Um, and then you'd have to make all the different documentation to to like run those experiments and plan those experiments. So what ends up happening is a lot of people rely on heruristics to um to come up with ideas for new drugs and uh we think that actually what's going to happen is people are going to change to be managers of these AI systems that are going out and doing all this work and structuring data and running analysis and then coming back and bubbling up recommendations that the human can then um you know make the final call on. Where at the intersection of AI and bio are you bearish given your given your experience, you know, working in in the pharmaceutical industry broadly? I'm I'm sure you see companies that raise $und00 million and uh maybe you're you uh don't always have the full faith of maybe their their venture capital backers.

Yeah, I'm relatively bearish on patient recruitment as a space. I think if you like look from uh just clinical trials like one of the obvious problems that there's not enough patients or it's hard to recruit patients for the trials. So trials runs more slowly than you would like. I think the reality is that the supply the demand for patients far exceeds the supply especially as we're developing more and more you know niche drugs for niche conditions and personalized genetic medicines. And I think you know a lot of these companies come up with a promise that we can source and find all these patients and bring them in when in reality the patients don't exist or they you know the only trial is being run in Mass General Hospital or something but the patient even if you add like an AI bot that can call hundreds of people or reach out to hundreds of people it doesn't solve the fundamental supply an AI bot that gives people rare diseases so that there are more patients to cure. This is the real strategy here.

Yeah. Or you can fly them from Nebraska to Boston or something.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably it. Uh that's the more humane thing to do. Um can you take me through kind of like uh within your clients uh your customers, is there a is there like a front office, back office dichotomy? Uh it sounds like this is not uh a you know electronic lab notebook. You're not in the lab. Um but how do the companies see the dividing line between like the knowledge work piece, the regulatory filings and then what's and the trial design versus the actual like mixing of the test tubes and like pipetting.

Yeah, I think broadly you can think of pharma companies are split into the R&D organization. Those are the guys in the lab with test tubes.

Uh the commercial organization and then the development organization.

Okay.

Uh the commercial organization sells the drugs. That's the sales reps. And then development organization, you know, many different functions within that, but broadly it's planning trials um and you know, communicating with stakeholders. So like one customer group we're working with, it's called a medical affairs function. Their goal is to coordinate with doctors and represent the company's science and programs uh to the external like world of doctors and they want they help with um you know communicating their science uh and and also like enrolling the doctors into their clinical trials. Is the comp or is the state-of-the-art or like the current solution is it more like Google Docs or pen and paper or is it like some custom ERP from a you know company that's kind of like loosely solved the problem and then been like sold 25 times.

Yeah, it's completely underpenetrated by software. So the current solution is consulting. I mean I started as a consultant so this is why I know this is a problem. You just have like massive amounts of human labor, highly compensated human labor

going and reading documents, inputting things into Excel, making powerpoints.

You know, the the software penetration is is the Microsoft Office

for Microsoft Excel still undefeated

Power can sell to uh Can you sell to consultants?

Um,

thinking about it,

we're we're not Yeah, they're not like we don't consider them our ICP.

Okay, got it. Makes sense. Uh, well, congrats.

Congrats on funding milestone. Uh given that Lee Marie did it, I'm sure you'll get a you know somebody that

multi-billion dollar acquisition offer right around the corner. She seems to be on a tear lately a year out or

uh but tell her said hi. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

Great stuff. Thanks so much for having Alex

and we are running late. Jordy has to hop on with Moadishu and Pyongyang actually

London Bermuda

and the Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Yeah.

He has to talk to the C. That's who you have to hop on the on with the Cayman Islands. I wonder why. Um anyway, thank you John Xley for hanging out in the chat. It's always a pleasure. Thank you Christopher and Feral Logix. Gabe,

uh everyone who's here, Taylor, uh we appreciate you.

There's 11ish days left of summer.

11ish days. There's something big coming. I was saying we're going to announce it today and Jordy said we can't announce it yet. It has to be the end of summer. So expect something big September 1st.

Very soon.

My world.

Very soon. We will talk to you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day.