The clinical trial designed itself overnight. The humans took the credit, and the patients got their years back.
Somewhere in a Barcelona office, a clinical scientist types a few sentences about a disease, a drug, and a hypothesis. Ninety seconds later, a draft trial protocol comes back - one that knows what the FDA and EMA will ask, flags the design choices likely to trigger an amendment, and cites the studies behind every recommendation. The scientist used to budget months for this. Now the bottleneck is reading speed.
That is Biorce in mid-2026: a healthtech company that has quietly turned one of pharma's most stubborn chores into software. Its platform, Aika, designs clinical trials. Not slides about trials - the actual protocols that regulators read and patients live inside. In February the company closed a $52.5 million Series A, the largest in the Iberian healthtech and AI ecosystem to date, and started moving its C-suite to Austin. For a four-year-old company, that is either reckless or a very good read of the room.
Clinical trials are becoming increasingly complex, yet protocol design has barely evolved in decades.
Bringing a single medicine to market takes, on average, a decade or more and north of a billion dollars. The romantic version blames the difficulty of biology. The honest version admits a less flattering culprit: paperwork. Protocols get written by hand, reviewed late, and amended often - and every amendment is a delay, a cost, and a patient still waiting.
Biorce's founders looked at that and saw something irritatingly avoidable. The science was hard; the process was just slow. Trials stall not because nobody knows the answer, but because designing the question is a manual, decades-old craft that nobody had bothered to modernize. It is a strange thing to leave un-automated in an industry that automates everything else.
Every day we remove from clinical development is a day gained for someone waiting.
Biorce did not begin in a boardroom. It began when Pedro Coelho's father received a terminal diagnosis. Promising treatments existed - they just sat behind trial processes too slow to reach him in time. The lesson Coelho took from it was specific and durable: the obstacle was not only the disease, it was the machinery around it.
So in 2022 he assembled a Portuguese founding team and pointed it at the machinery. Clara Bernardes took the clinical and scientific side, Jose Faria the engineering, Diogo Pisoeiro the product design. The bet was unfashionable at the time: that AI could do more than summarize medical text - it could design the trials themselves, defensibly enough that a regulator would accept the work. Most people thought that was the part you could not automate. That was rather the point.
A Portuguese founding team sets out to automate clinical trial design, starting with the clinical AI assistant later known as Jarvis.
Led by YZR Capital and Mustard Seed Maze - early conviction that protocol design is a software problem.
Europe's largest impact-focused fund backs the Aika platform's expansion.
Pharma, biotech and CROs sign on. The year closes well ahead of plan.
DST Global leads the largest Series A in Iberian healthtech/AI; Biorce wins the 4YFN26 Health Tech category.
The US expansion begins in earnest, with a Boston conference following in May.
Aika is the engine. It pairs machine learning, statistical modeling, and natural language processing on top of a corpus most research teams could not read in several careers: more than one million clinical studies, 260,000-plus protocols, 25 years of research, and the peer-reviewed literature around it. Feed it the shape of a trial and it returns a regulator-ready protocol - reportedly at 86% accuracy - while simulating models, surfacing feasibility risks, and pointing out where the FDA or EMA will object before they do.
The unglamorous detail that matters: it shows its work. Biorce calls this Defensible AI - evidence-based, auditable recommendations a sponsor can actually defend to a regulator. In an industry that treats "the model said so" as a non-answer, that is the difference between a demo and a deployment.
The core AI for trial design - protocols, simulations, and risk flags in roughly 90 seconds, trained on 1M+ studies.
The clinical AI assistant for universal access to clinical data, so teams can query the evidence directly.
Explainable, auditable recommendations aligned with FDA and EMA expectations. The black box shows its math.
Operational tracking that follows trial performance and the downstream effect of every design decision.
Build fast, but with quality. No excuses, just solutions. We're not here to play small.
Conviction is cheap; the cap table is not. Biorce's Series A was led by DST Global - the firm behind early bets on Facebook, Alibaba and Spotify - with Norrsken VC and YZR Capital doubling down and Endeavor Catalyst joining. The angels are a tell of their own: Nik Storonsky of Revolut and Arthur Mensch of Mistral AI both wrote checks. People who build category-defining companies tend to recognize one.
The traction underneath is the part that justifies the headline. Biorce ended 2025 roughly 200% above its revenue target, selling Aika to pharmaceutical companies, biotechs and CROs that treat it as a co-pilot rather than a curiosity. And in February it added a trophy: the Health Tech category at the 4YFN26 Awards in Barcelona.
A world where every patient can access the treatments they need, when they need them - not years too late.
Biorce's stated mission is to accelerate access to life-saving treatments by making clinical trials faster, smarter, and fully transparent. It is the kind of sentence every healthtech company prints. The difference here is the origin story behind it - a founder who watched the clock run out on his own father - and a product that attacks the specific minutes the clock wastes.
The team building it is international and unusually balanced for the field, around 45% female across roughly 130 people split between Europe and the US. Their long-term ambition has a name engineers find hard to resist: the one-click clinical trial. It sounds like a slogan. It is closer to a roadmap.
Return to the Barcelona office, the scientist, the ninety seconds. Multiply it. A protocol that used to take months now takes an afternoon to refine, which means a trial starts a quarter earlier, which means a result arrives a quarter sooner, which means a patient somewhere is not asked to wait through a delay that existed only because the paperwork was slow.
That is the whole bet, scaled. Biorce is not curing disease - it is removing the dead time around the cure. If the company is right, the most valuable thing it ships is not software. It is the calendar pages it gives back. The coffee, for what it's worth, is still hot.