Health care startup Paige.ai announced that it has completed its Series A funding round to raise $25 million to continue its work in cancer diagnosis with help from computer vision trained with clinical imaging data. Datasets relating to treatment and genomics will also be included in the company’s deep learning models. Initial work by Paige.ai will center on the detection of breast, prostate, and other major cancers. Paige.ai also announced that it has signed an agreement with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre to gain access to its database of 25 million pathology slides.
The Series A round was led by a number of legendary investors, including Jim Breyer, founder and chief executive officer of Breyer Capital, a premier global venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California.
Paige.ai was founded by Dr. Thomas Fuchs, director of computational pathology at the Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Fuchs said Paige.ai is working on technology to augment, not replace, pathologists.
“If you’re teaching a self-driving car on a closed course, anyone can label a tree or a sign so the system can recognize it,” Fuchs said in a statement shared with VentureBeat. “But imagine the additional guidance that car would require to navigate New York City. The same is true in a specialized medical domain like oncology. You must have both massive data sets and specialists with decades of training to ensure that the computer models are up to difficult tasks.”
Paige.ai currently has five employees but plans to use some of its funding to hire at least 20 additional employees. The company aims to catalyze a fundamental medical AI paradigm shift, transforming pathology and diagnostics from a qualitative to a more rigorous, quantitative discipline.
