Alex Telford is the Founder of Convoke, a South San Francisco-based company building the AI-native operating system for biopharma—a unified platform that codifies decision logic, connects internal and external data, and generates critical deliverables across the entire drug development lifecycle.
Before founding Convoke in 2024, Alex spent nearly a decade in life sciences strategy consulting, rising to Associate Principal while advising biopharma companies on development strategy, regulatory planning, and competitive intelligence—and writing prolifically along the way about where the industry was going wrong and what it would take to fix it.
At Convoke, Alex is building purpose-built software that replaces the fragmented, document-heavy workflows slowing down drug development with an AI-powered system that lets teams move faster and make better decisions with the knowledge they already have. With $8.6 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins and Dimension Capital, and a founding thesis that the biggest bottleneck in drug development isn't science but the operating infrastructure around it—Alex's journey from expat kid reading New Scientist in Switzerland, to biochemist at Bristol, to consultant turned founder, demonstrates what it looks like when someone spends years diagnosing an industry's deepest inefficiencies and then decides to be the one to fix them.
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