By Bhavish Lekh, Co-founder & CEO

The Aurora Suite started as an idea I couldn't let go of.

After a decade leading feasibility operations across 400+ clinical studies at Syneos Health, Synteract, Medpace, and IQVIA, I kept seeing the same problem — brilliant teams making critical strategic decisions under impossible time pressure, armed with spreadsheets and fragmented data. I knew there was a better way, and I couldn't stop thinking about what it would look like.

The Problem I Lived Every Day

In the clinical trial world, CROs typically have 7–10 days to respond to a Request for Proposal. Within that window, feasibility and strategy get squeezed into just 1–2 days. Teams are forced to manually pull data from seven or more disconnected sources, reconcile everything in spreadsheets, and make strategic decisions worth millions — all before the deadline hits.

I spent years watching talented people work under these conditions. Smart, experienced professionals making gut calls instead of informed decisions because there simply wasn't time to do it properly. Country selections that should have been grounded in data were based on instinct and familiarity. Site strategies that should have been backed by evidence were built from memory and personal networks.

The tools that existed — large enterprise data platforms designed for pharmaceutical companies — were expensive, generic, and fundamentally not built for the way CRO teams actually work. They gave you data, but they didn't give you answers. And for small and mid-size CROs, they weren't accessible at all.

From Idea to Prototype

In early 2023, I started building. Not with a team of engineers — with my own hands. I mapped every workflow I had ever used in feasibility. I sketched out what a purpose-built decision engine would look like if it were designed by someone who had actually done the job, not by a software company looking in from the outside.

The early prototypes were rough, but they worked. I tested them with real CRO teams during consulting engagements, refining the product concept against real-world feedback. By the end of 2023, the market signal was clear — this wasn't just a nice idea, it was something people needed.

In January 2024, Aurora Analytica was incorporated.

Building the Team

When I founded Aurora Analytica Consulting in early 2023, I started reaching out to people across the industry — pitching consulting projects and sharing my vision for what a purpose-built feasibility platform could look like.

One of those people was Ola Gudmundsen, a 30-year veteran of clinical research and the founder of LINK Medical Research. What started as a conversation about consulting turned into months of deeper discussions about the technology, the market, and the opportunity. Eventually, Ola was the one who raised the idea of investment. I pitched him the full business plan, and in January 2024 we registered Aurora Analytica AS together. Ola came on board as Chairman, bringing three decades of CRO leadership, an unmatched industry network, and the kind of commercial credibility that takes years to build.

Espen Gudmundsen joined as CTO and has been integral to everything we've built since. With over a decade of experience building secure, AI-driven software systems in regulated industries, he is the technical backbone of the Aurora Suite. The platform's architecture — 10 microservices, AI enrichment pipelines, cloud infrastructure — is as much his achievement as the product vision is mine.

What We Built

The Aurora Suite is an AI-powered decision intelligence platform purpose-built for CROs and pharmaceutical companies. It replaces fragmented, spreadsheet-driven feasibility processes with integrated decision engines:

Trial Core is the foundation — a continuously learning database of 550K+ clinical trial records, enriched through a 5-stage AI pipeline that adds proprietary analytical layers you won't find in any source data. It turns days of manual data preparation into hours.

Geo Matrix is powered by our proprietary EKO algorithm — the Enhanced Knowledge Operator — designed by feasibility data scientists to evaluate and rank countries across competition, experience, operations, and patient access.

Simulator-L is a Monte Carlo enabled enrolment and site activation simulator. It lets users set specifications at study, country, and site level, run and compare multiple predictive models, and generate probability curves and key performance visuals.

Every module was designed by people who have done feasibility for a living. That matters. It means every output, every metric, and every visual reflects how teams actually work in practice — not how an engineer imagined they might.

The Milestones

  • Launched the Geo Matrix MVP in August 2024 — less than eight months after incorporation.
  • Confirmed our first enterprise SaaS subscription in January 2026.
  • Passed Stage 1 of the European Innovation Council Accelerator — one of Europe's most competitive deep-tech funding programmes.
  • Raised over EUR 400K in private and public funding.
  • Our customers have given us a perfect Net Promoter Score of 10 out of 10.
  • Our methodology was independently validated through a peer-reviewed poster presented at the ESMO 2024 Congress.

What's Next

We are scaling. We are hiring. We are building new modules. And we are working toward a future where clinical trial strategy is driven by intelligence, not instinct.

If you're a CRO or pharmaceutical company that's tired of making critical decisions on spreadsheets, I'd love to talk. If you're someone who wants to build the future of clinical development, I'd love to hear from you.

This is just the beginning.

Bhavish Lekh is the Co-founder and CEO of Aurora Analytica. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or reach out at bhav@aurora-analytica.com.