This morning Mendel, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to help structure medical information, scored $18 million in Series A funding. DCM led the round with participation from Olive Tree, Zola Global Investors, Millennium Technology Value Partners, Launch Capital, SOSV, Bootstrap Labs and independent investors.

This deal comes roughly four years after the company announced its first $2 million seed funding round. Since then, Crunchbase has reported two more seed rounds worth $3 million and $2.4 million.

As part of the deal, Olive Tree Managing Partner Nichola Eliovits will join Mendel's board.

 WHAT THEY DO

Mendel uses AI to make sense of unstructured EHR data and clinical literature and provides analytical data to the end user. All of the analytical output is validated by a team of clinicians.

Clients can use the technology for hypothesis generation, trial matching, synthetic control arms, outcome research and commercial intelligence.

In addition to the funding, the company announced a new partnership with online faxing company eFax, which will integrate its solution with Mendel's AI tool to make every fax ready to be put into analytics.

WHAT IT'S FOR

Mendel plans to use the infusion of cash to build out its business and sales team.

“Our mission is to build a machine that can learn from the care journey of every patient. We’ve spent the last three years building an end-to-end platform that can quickly and intelligently interpret unstructured patient data,” Dr. Karim Galil, Mendel's CEO and founder, said in a statement. “Since our platform became commercially available last year, our revenue has increased by 15X. It’s clear that our customers see Mendel’s value as we’ve had a 100% conversion rate from our pilot program to multi-year agreements. This funding will help us grow the team and reach the next phase of our business.”

THE LARGER TREND

Several companies have been looking to use artificial intelligence to help structure health data. Notably, Google is looking to tackle EHR navigation issues with its new tool Care Studios, which helps clinicians search and organize patients' medical records. The tool lets clinicians search through a patient's records across different EHRs.

Other companies are looking into the clinical trial matching space. For example, when the Mayo Clinic employed IBM's Watson for Clinical Trial matching system, the researchers saw an 80% increase in enrollment of clinical trials for breast cancer.