About

I'm Ellis Hiroki Butterfield. I work on software at the intersection of AI and clinical research, mostly on the problem of making AI outputs that hold up under a regulatory audit.

I co-founded studyOS, where we built a validated AI assistant for clinical trial data — it turned a plain-language question into auditable SQL you could read before it ran. Sitero acquired us in 2025, and I stayed on as CTO for a while, looking after product and technology. I recently left to take a break from working.

Before that I had a few other tries: Butterfly Labs, a diagnostics startup acquired by Lifeforce; Get Franklin, a healthcare payments idea I bootstrapped and eventually shut down; and earlier, a stint as a product manager on Azure SQL Data Warehouse at Microsoft. I studied economics and computer science at Claremont McKenna.

Not everything worked, and I've learned at least as much from the things that didn't. This site is where I write some of that down.