Healthcare AI company Viz.ai announced today that it has raised $21 million in Series A funding. The investment was led by Kleiner Perkins, with additional participation from GV (formerly Google Ventures).
Viz.ai’s primary product is Contact, the first FDA-cleared clinical decision support (CDS) tool that analyzes CT results and highlights cases that may have experienced a stroke for review by a neurovascular specialist. According to today’s statement, the company will be using its new backing to expand its offering into new markets, and to extend its product portfolio to conditions outside of stroke.
“We were attracted not only to the technology behind Viz.ai and its impact on patient outcomes, but also its adoption model,” Mamoon Hamid, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins who will be joining Viz.ai’s board, said in a statement. “Many new health-tech solutions struggle to gain traction because they are an outside-in sale to medical teams, requiring changes to procedures and workflows. In contrast, physicians and their teams are driving adoption of the Viz.ai platform because it is not disruptive to emergency room procedures and fits naturally into existing systems.”
Viz.ai received de novo 510(k) clearance for Contact in February, just a few months after the agency released its long-awaited draft guidance on CDS products that outlined which tools would and would not be regulated by the agency. The software, which also received a CE mark in January, is employed during the time a first-line provider is reviewing a patient’s images, and is intended to highlight cases in need of a specialist consultation earlier than they normally would be. The tool is not intended as a stand in for a full patient evaluation during diagnosis.
“In stroke every minute matters. Our goal is to fundamentally change healthcare, making it proactive rather than reactive,” Dr. Chris Mansi, cofounder and CEO of Viz.ai, said in a statement. “By integrating Viz, we believe healthcare systems can increase access to proven life saving therapy and reduce the time to treatment across their referral network. AI-assisted triage has the potential to save lives and reduce disability.”
Viz.ai is based in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, and was founded in 2016 by Mansi and David Golan, the company’s CTO.
