Projects

What it is

Cohera builds the compliance infrastructure layer for pharmaceutical, medical device, and life sciences companies. Our flagship product, BioWise, manages supplier certificates, quality documentation, and regulatory compliance workflows — replacing the spreadsheets and email chains that still run quality management at most regulated companies.

The problem

Pharmaceutical manufacturers are legally required to maintain an approved supplier list and validate every external material that enters their supply chain. In practice, this means collecting and re-validating thousands of supplier documents — certificates of analysis, GMP certificates, audit reports — on repeating cycles. Most companies manage this in Excel and Outlook. When an FDA inspector asks to see your supplier qualification records, you are manually assembling binders.

Architecture

Integration-first: we connect to the ERP, quality management, and supplier systems companies already run — SAP, Veeva Vault, TrackWise, MasterControl — rather than asking them to replace existing infrastructure. The compliance data model is built around 21 CFR Part 11 and EU GMP Annex 11 audit trail requirements from the ground up, not bolted on afterward.

AI-assisted certificate intake reads incoming supplier documents, extracts structured data, and routes them through configurable approval workflows — reducing manual processing time for quality teams.

What it was

Realm was a reactive, cross-platform mobile database engine built to solve a problem that the industry said couldn't be solved reliably: offline-first data management with real-time synchronization across iOS, Android, Xamarin, and React Native. We shipped a zero-copy, MVCC-based database that could replace SQLite and Core Data while adding live objects and reactive queries as first-class primitives.

The hard part

The database engine itself — written in C++ with platform-specific bindings — had to be correct under concurrent access patterns that mobile developers hadn't had to think about before. The sync engine required a custom operational transformation protocol to handle conflict resolution across devices that could be offline for extended periods. We built both from scratch because nothing existing fit the constraints.

At peak, the SDK was processing data for over two billion installations across millions of applications. The developer community became our strongest distribution channel — word of mouth from iOS engineers who were tired of Core Data drove most early growth.

What I learned

Developer tools companies live or die on DX (developer experience) before features. A database that's technically superior but takes two hours to integrate loses to one that works in twenty minutes. We eventually got this right, but it took two major SDK rewrites to internalize it. The lesson applies everywhere: the best technical product isn't the one with the best internals — it's the one that makes its users productive fastest.