Partnering with Convoke to Redefine Biopharma Knowledge Work
Drug development is often associated with breakthroughs in the lab, the discovery of a promising molecule, the elegance of a new modality, or the development of a novel protein language model. But the less glamorous truth is that the majority of cost and time in bringing a drug to market doesn’t happen at the bench and isn’t limited by Nobel Prize winning science. It happens in the “white space”: coordination across functions, regulatory submissions, review and analysis of mountains of data, and reconciling insights from consultants, vendors, and internal experts. In fact, nearly half of a drug’s development timeline can be spent on this knowledge work. Every week lost means millions in foregone revenue—and more importantly, patients waiting longer for life-saving therapies.
Convoke is building a solution for this hidden bottleneck. Their platform serves as an information and analysis operating system for life sciences, designed to transform raw knowledge into the deliverables that drive critical decisions. Teams can bring their fragmented information: internal files, proprietary datasets, and external research into one unified ontology. On top of that foundation, Convoke allows users to build automations that codify decision logic and turn scattered inputs into outputs: competitive intelligence briefs, regulatory-ready documents, scientific manuscripts, and more. What previously required expensive consultants and months of manual effort can now be accomplished in-house, in days. This represents a real step change improvement in how biopharma organizations operate, and early customers are already reporting significant time and cost savings from deployed projects.
The founding team Alex Telford, Maged Ahmed, and Vikas Velagapudi bring together the domain expertise and technical depth needed to make this vision real. Alex has spent years advising biopharma companies at one of the largest consulting firms in the industry, developing a sharp perspective on where the true bottlenecks lie. Vikas was a founding engineer at Commure, a leading healthcare AI startup, and engineering leader at Applied Intuition. Maged was early at Applied Intuition, where he led their products to handle autonomy data at scale, a category with direct parallels to the problem space in life sciences. Together, they bring the ambition and insight to reimagine life science workflows in the age of AI. Many of us on the Dimension team have been avid readers of Alex’s blog on the Pharma industry and have known Maged and Vikas as highly sought after engineering leaders in Silicon Valley.
The “so what” is clear. Over the last decade, the scientific frontier has expanded dramatically with advances in generative models for molecular design, novel therapeutic modalities, and genetically defined medicines that expand therapeutic capabilities. But while discovery accelerates, the supporting machinery of drug development has lagged. Convoke’s mission is to close that gap: to reduce the procedural burden, eliminate overhead, and allow biopharma teams to focus on the science and strategy that matter most. By making knowledge work faster, more accurate, and more scalable, Convoke is helping ensure that more medicines actually make it to the patients who need them.
We’ve had the privilege of knowing Alex, Maged, and Vikas from the very beginning and are thrilled to partner with them on their journey of building Convoke. From those early days of co-working in the Dimension SF office, to the early product releases, to the public launch and scaled customer adoption, it has been incredible to see the progress and industry reception so far. We look forward to supporting their journey as they redefine how biopharma knowledge work gets done in the AI era and make a tremendous impact in the industry.
