Accelerating Clinical Trial Approval With the Power of AI: Levi Lian's Journey Building Raycaster
AI and other technological advances are unlocking the potential to make unprecedented discoveries in life sciences and medicine. But the bottleneck to adoption still lies in what happens after discovery—the medical approval process.
Drug development can take up to ten years from discovery to patient access, with much of that time consumed by clinical trials, regulatory paperwork, and documentation.
With a background in systems engineering and a passion for medicine, Levi Lian recognized that these regulatory processes were preventing patients from getting the care they needed. So he set out to build Raycaster and accelerate the path from lab discovery to patient impact.
Introducing Raycaster: Document Intelligence for Drug Development
Raycaster is an AI-native workspace for bio pharmaceutical that brings document intelligence to regulatory workflows, helping companies save time and get to approval faster. From Phase 2/3 trials through global submissions, Raycaster’s agents understand dense regulatory documents, identify what needs updating across systems, and generate first drafts for CMC and clinical submissions.
Many life sciences companies began investing in digitalization during the COVID-19 pandemic, often aggregating product and trial data into database systems like Veeva. But most still struggle to analyze or act upon this data intelligently, making regulatory workflows and documentation highly manual.
Raycaster provides the missing analysis layer—agentic AI tuned for regulated life-science content. Its agents continuously monitor dossiers, variations, and global requirements, highlight impacted documents, and draft compliant updates with verifiable citations. And unlike generic AI tools that require technical mindsets to use effectively, Raycaster is built around real regulatory and CMC workflows, so medical writers and operations teams can ship stronger submissions with far less rework.
Within life sciences, Raycaster is already partnering with companies that have drugs in Phase 2/3 trials and are working on global submissions. Customers report up to 80% reduction in document update time—what previously took two weeks across 20 documents now takes days.
Levi’s Journey to Raycaster
Levi’s career path was set out for him before he was even born—raised in a four-generation medical family, he was expected to become the next doctor in the lineage. But at Stanford, he discovered how AI and systems engineering could accelerate science itself. Instead of going to medical school, he studied Symbolic Systems and worked in AI labs on early foundation-model applications and research projects spanning reproducible machine learning and reinforcement learning.
After several years shipping AI in the real world at Intuit and Uber, however, Levi felt compelled to contribute to healthcare. He’d witnessed talented college classmates enter life sciences but become frustrated by paperwork and regulatory burdens. With a foot in both worlds—medicine at home, AI at work—Levi became convinced that the bottleneck in modern drug development wasn’t discovery, but the regulatory workflows in between.
After leading Raycaster through Y Combinator, Levi raised funding from early investors with deep experience in health and biotech, and has since been highlighted by TechCrunch and Sacra, among others. Most recently, Levi was invited as a main-stage speaker at UC Berkeley’s Agentic AI Summit, where he spoke about bringing agentic AI into high-stakes workflows in life sciences.
Raycaster’s second product, just launched for early access, was selected as a winner in NVIDIA and Nebius’ Evolved AIxBio (AI for Bio) competition and slated for showcase at NVIDIA’s headquarters. Now a team of four, Raycaster is already supporting notable companies like Agilent, Yokogawa, and Genefab, while continuing to grow its customer base across the globe.
Levi’s advice for Fellow Founders
Having now worked across a range of sectors, Levi encourages founders to question preconceived notions about industries that are “slow” to innovate. Even large pharmaceutical companies, he says, move fast when something is important to them.
To drive progress, founders must “match and exceed customer speed,” he explains. “You set the tempo for disruption; customers are watching how fast you respond.” That same philosophy guides how Raycaster ships agentic AI into some of the most regulated environments in the world.
To learn more about Levi’s journey, you can follow him on LinkedIn and visit Raycaster.ai.
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