Oktopi secures follow-on funding to expand OktoPilot's AI-informed capabilities, building on the inaugural global health grant

Grant from the Gates Foundation supports the next phase of work to strengthen OktoPilot's AI-informed capabilities for global health medicine developers

MELBOURNE, July 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Oktopi has received follow-on funding from the Gates Foundation, extending its original grant to advance OktoPilot, the platform's AI-informed agentic capability for medicine development, which launched with its peer review feature.  

The new funding builds directly on results delivered under the foundation’s initial investment, announced in January 2026, which supported the build-out of Oktopi’s AI-informed knowledge and workflow engine. Since that award, Oktopi has calibrated OktoPilot’s performance through a blinded, multi-rater calibration study against subject-matter expert review, and has continued to expand the platform’s taxonomies, evidence expectations, and decision pathways for use across diverse global health research and development settings.

The supplemental award will fund a defined set of work packages to further develop and scale OktoPilot’s AI-informed capabilities, with a continued focus on supporting innovators in low- and middle-income countries and lean global health research teams who often lack access to deep, in-house development expertise.

Dr Craig Rayner AM
CEO, Oktopi
“We built OktoPilot to put rigorous, expert-level review within reach of teams who don’t have it on staff. This next phase lets us take that capability further, and put it directly into the hands of more global health innovators.”

Michelle Rayner
COO, Oktopi
“Delivering the first phase of this work taught us a great deal about what global health teams actually need from an AI-informed platform. This next phase lets us act on that directly. We are focused on making sure what we build stays grounded in real use, and immediately useful to the people doing the work.”

Mark Sullivan AO
Chair, Oktopi
“This funding allows Oktopi to keep closing the expertise gap that too often stands between a promising medicine and the patients who need it, particularly in communities that have historically been locked out of that expertise.”

About Oktopi
Oktopi is an AI-informed knowledge and workflow engine designed to strengthen decision quality, transparency, and efficiency across the medicine development lifecycle. The platform integrates expert-built taxonomies, logic, and human-guided AI workflows with a growing global community of contributors.

OktoPilot is Oktopi's AI-informed agentic capability, launched with AI-informed peer review and expanding to support a broader range of development decisions.

Oktopi helps teams and governance bodies work with greater clarity and consistency, supporting developers of all sizes, including those in low- and middle-income countries, to operate at globally recognized best practice standards.

www.oktopi.com

Media Contact

Michelle Rayner
COO, Oktopi
info@oktopi.com