Kibbutz Shefayim Israel-based deep learning startup Zebra Medical Vision has just closed a $30 million Series C funding round led by aMoon and Aurum Ventures with participation from Johnson & Johnson Innovation JJDC and Intermountain Healthcare.
“Medical experts worldwide are facing a critical challenge in handling overwhelming demand. We are excited to partner with the Zebra team, which is harnessing the power of data and machine learning to provide physicians and healthcare systems with tools to dramatically increase capacity, while improving patient care,” Dr. Yair Schindel, managing partner at aMoon VC, said in a statement. “This investment aligns with our vision of backing scalable and sustainable innovations that will have a valuable impact on fundamental facets of global healthcare.”
Zebra Medical Visionhas a focus on designing artificial intelligence tools for medical imaging and radiology. In fact, this morning the Israeli company also unveiled its Textray chest X-ray research, which the company is calling the “most comprehensive AI research conducted on chest X-rays to date.” The AI tool was trained on 2 million images to identify 40 common clinical findings. According to the company, it had a high agreement between teh algorithm and expert radiologists.
The company’s product are currently circulating all over the globe. Currently, seven of its products have a CE regulatory mark, with other products also being used in Asia and Latin America. Right now the company is charging $1 per scan for hospitals to use its algorithm.
In May 2016 the company announced that it had landed $12 million in a Series B financing round. This latest funding announcement brings the company’s total financing to $50 million.
When it comes to Zebra's investors, many have experience in medical imaging. Intermountain Healthcare, for instance, already teamed up with Zebra in March of 2017 to integrate the latter's machine learning in medical imaging analysis.
Also among Zebra' existing investors is Nvidia, a hardware giant out of Silicon Valley. Nvidia has gained a foothold in digital health and specifically the medical imaging space, and recently announced plans for its new medical imaging AI platform called Clara. The idea is for the technology to be able to work with existing instruments.
“Medical imaging is never going to go away,” Kimberly Powell, VP of healthcare at Nvidia, told MobiHealthNews in April. “What these computational approaches are doing is improving image quality and helping where, for doctors, it is difficult to see or helping them with things that take a long time to do.”
