How Octozi Is Using AI to Accelerate Clinical Trials and Bring Drugs to Market Faster

Before reaching patients, every new drug must pass through the complex, time-consuming process of clinical development, where only 8% of candidates make it from Phase 1 to FDA approval. 

We had the privilege to speak with the founding team at Octozi to discuss why they believe they are solving this major bottleneck in healthcare. 

Founders Amit Patel (CEO) and Matt Purri (CTO) first met through a co-founder matchmaking program in 2022. Patel had led product at Google, Meta and most recently Tempo, a health tech startup that used 3D sensors and AI to help people optimize their health. Purri was with Waymo, where he built dynamic vehicle detection algorithms that reached production within four months of his arrival.  

The two bonded over past shared experiences at Google and mutual interest in building a mission-driven company. Shortly after, Octozi was born. 

Octozi is building best-in-class AI for clinical development. By combining large language models with human oversight, its agents help pharma and biotech companies identify errors, inconsistencies and safety signals. This ensures that clinical trial data is high quality and analysis-ready, enabling faster and more dynamic trials. 

“The process of getting a new drug to market and into treatment is a real bottleneck for this whole industry” said Purri, who holds a PhD in Machine Learning from Rutgers University. “Because this can take decades and cost billions of dollars, how do we find ways to do that more efficiently?” 

In August 2025, a controlled study found that in comparison to traditional methods, Octozi’s agents increased data cleaning throughput by 6x, all while simultaneously reducing error rates from 54.67% to 8.48%. This has the potential to save companies millions of dollars. 

Last month, Patel and Purri raised a $3 million seed round led by Surface Ventures, and they are not looking back. They also welcomed Founding Engineer Zachary Munro, who holds a triple major from Tufts University with a large breadth of startup experience under his belt. The team is small but mighty, and fully embracing the excitement of being an early-stage startup. 

“The startup journey is very exciting because you’re tackling this massive problem with the opportunity to think outside the box. You’re not attached to this legacy product that can’t be changed” said Patel, who left behind leadership positions at mature companies to build Octozi.

Octozi has the opportunity to think: ‘What if you were to do this differently?’ Patel said: “That can be unnerving to some people, but it’s essentially how you innovate.” 

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