Proscia, a number one provider of digital pathology software, today announced that it has raised $9 million in an extension of its Series C financing round, bringing its total raised to $46 million. The funding follows recent funding from Proscia FDA approval for its software platform, allowing the corporate to expand its reach within the US diagnostics market.
The Series C extension was led by Highline Capital Management and Triangle Peak Partners, with participation from existing investors including Alpha Intelligence Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Hitachi Ventures and others. The funds shall be used to speed up Proscia's business growth and further develop its AI-powered applications for all times sciences and diagnostic laboratories.
“We are very happy about this official approval. “It essentially allows us to sell our diagnostic products within the US market at a time when the world really needs them,” said David West, co-founder and CEO of Proscia, in an interview with VentureBeat. “This funding will allow us to advance our mission to rework the best way we diagnose and treat diseases like cancer by unlocking the facility of digital pathology data and AI.”
Harnessing the potential of digital pathology and AI
Already utilized by 14 of the highest 20 pharmaceutical corporations, Proscia's software platform leverages massive amounts of pathology imaging data to advance drug discovery and development. With FDA approval, Proscia can now bring its digital pathology solutions to diagnostic laboratories, addressing the growing challenges of a world pathologist shortage and rising cancer rates.
“Pathology data is incredibly infrastructure intensive,” West told VentureBeat. “We are talking about orders of magnitude larger than other medical data. This is why corporations like Nvidia are talking a lot about AI in life sciences and the necessity for GPUs. We’ve worked with cloud providers like AWS and Azure to make it very easy to scale across the enterprise.”
Proscia's open platform approach enables the corporate, its partners and its customers to develop and deploy AI applications targeting specific diseases and use cases. “It’s a bit like how OpenAI has the ChatGPT app marketplace,” West said. “It’s an identical model to how we work.”
Leading the transformation of digital pathology
As digital pathology adoption accelerates and is anticipated to succeed in 100% in the following 5-7 years, Proscia is well positioned to steer the transformation. The company's AI applications automate tasks equivalent to quality control and tumor identification, allowing pathologists to work more efficiently and concentrate on higher-level evaluation.
“I believe in some ways Silicon Valley has had a type of ignored pathology,” West said. “It’s a troublesome, regulated space with lots of data. But it's an enormous market, and it's one which's really influential. We exist because we consider pathology deserves great software.”
With its recent funding and FDA approval, Proscia is poised to make this impact a reality and usher in a brand new era of data-driven, AI-powered pathology that may ultimately improve patient outcomes. As the convergence of digital pathology and AI accelerates, Proscia, with its open platform approach and enterprise-wide solutions, is an organization to look at within the rapidly evolving healthcare technology landscape.
