Global Landscape of 92 AI-Driven Healthcare Startups: Funding, Innovations, and Market Prospects

CB Insights recently updated its landscape of AI startups in the healthcare sector, analyzing the funding activities of 92 companies. Among them, China’s iCarbonX secured the largest financing round in this field. This article was initially compiled and published by our partner media Synced, and subsequently reorganized and edited by VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat).

In a quarterly analysis of AI healthcare companies by VCBeat, the number of deals in this sector surged from 10 in 2011 to 60 in 2015. As of August 23, 2016, companies in this field had completed a total of 55 funding rounds. Recent transactions include London-based startup Babylon Health’s $25 million Series A financing, with investors including Kinnevik and Google DeepMind, and China-based iCarbonX’s $154 million Series A financing.

“By 2025, artificial intelligence systems will encompass everything from population health management to digitally addressing patient needs.” — Harpreet Singh Buttar, Analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

We have identified more than 90 startups applying machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics. These companies leverage such technologies to accelerate drug discovery, provide virtual assistants for patients, diagnose diseases through medical image analysis, and more. We first published this market landscape in April 2016. It has since been updated to include companies that completed financing rounds from January 2013 onward, while removing entities such as MetaMind, which was recently acquired by Salesforce.

The number of AI startups focusing on imaging and diagnostics is increasing:Since January 2015, 17 out of 22 companies engaged in medical imaging and diagnostics have completed their first round of financing (including seed and Series A rounds).

Among these, the largest amount was iCarbonX’s $154 million Series A financing round, with major investors including Tencent, Vcanbio, and Tianfu Group. iCarbonX Co., Ltd. was founded on October 27, 2015, by Wang Jun, former CEO of BGI Genomics. The company’s projects are built upon the world’s most professional, exponentially growing, holistic, full-lifecycle health and medical big data, leveraging cutting-edge data mining and machine learning analytics to provide personalized health index analysis and predictions. The core founding team of iCarbonX has many years of in-depth experience in mobile health, healthcare services, biological data analysis, artificial intelligence, and data mining.

The second-largest amount was a $175 million Series C financing round for Flatiron Health, which focuses on oncology. The round was led by Roche, with other participants including Allen & Company, Baillie Gifford, and Casdin Capital. Flatiron Health provides the first cloud-based oncology data platform: OncologyCloud. Designed specifically for oncology, this platform aggregates real-time clinical and financial data, offers comprehensive patient medical records, and helps various organizations fully leverage their data.

Third, Butterfly Networks completed a $10 million Series C financing round, with investment from Aeris Capital and Stanford University. The company specializes in developing the world’s smallest ultrasound imaging device, with its core concept being to enable ultrasound imaging through small devices such as smartphones.

Venture Capital in Drug Discovery: Startups are leveraging machine learning algorithms to accelerate the drug discovery process, with venture capital firms having invested in six out of eight drug discovery companies.

Andreessen Horowitz recently made a seed investment in twoXAR, which developed the DUMA drug discovery platform to evaluate large public and private datasets. This enables the identification of potential drugs within minutes and ranks drug-disease matches by probability, whereas traditional research typically takes years.

Khosla Ventures and Data Collective have invested in Atomwise, a company that leverages supercomputers for drug discovery and development. The company aims to simulate pharmaceutical processes using supercomputers, artificial intelligence, and complex algorithms to predict the efficacy of new drugs while reducing R&D costs. Last year, Atomwise announced its first publicly disclosed discovery of a potential treatment for Ebola and established a collaboration with Merck.

Lightspeed Venture Partners invested in Numedii in 2013. Numedii effectively leveraged big data to accelerate the new drug development process by forming strategic partnerships with data source providers to overcome data acquisition challenges.

Foundation Capital participated in Numerate’s Series C financing round. The company is leveraging machine learning to reduce the time and capital required for discovering new therapies.

Khosla Ventures has invested in five companies: Khosla Ventures has become the most active investor in this field, having invested in the following five companies.

1. Ginger.io, based in San Francisco, USA, focuses on patients’ symptoms of depression and anxiety. It has innovatively developed an analytics platform capable of determining whether users are in an abnormal psychological state and whether they should receive appropriate psychotherapy;

2. Lumiata, a healthcare analytics platform founded in January 2013 and headquartered in San Mateo, United States, is a big data healthcare services company that primarily leverages big data techniques to enable real-time predictive analytics for healthcare services. Lumiata’s core predictive analytics product is Risk Matrix, which requires the collection of extensive data points from health plan members or patients to map out each individual’s trajectory of disease risk over time;

3. Israel’s Zebra Medical Vision has launched the world’s most comprehensive medical imaging research platform, featuring advanced processing capabilities that enable researchers to rapidly develop imaging algorithms and extract critical insights from large-scale datasets. These algorithms help reduce false positives, identify missed findings, facilitate early diagnosis of cancer and other diseases, and detect incidental findings from vast amounts of imaging data in healthcare providers’ archives.

3. Bay Labs, a California-based company founded on November 12, 2013, and headquartered in San Francisco, California, is primarily engaged in the development and sale of software that leverages deep learning technology to diagnose rheumatic heart disease;

4. Drug discovery startup Atomwise.(This company has been introduced in detail previously and will not be reiterated.)

Remote Patient Monitoring:New York-based startup AiCure has secured $12.3 million in Series A funding, with investors including Biomatics Capital Partners, New Leaf Venture Partners, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, and Tribeca Venture Partners. The company uses artificial intelligence to ensure patient medication adherence. California-based startup Sense.ly has developed Molly, a virtual nursing assistant that provides follow-up care for patients after discharge. The company claims that Molly supplies physicians with “20% of daily feedback.” Sentrian, which is backed by Frost Data Capital, analyzes biosensor data and sends alerts to physicians regarding high-risk patients.

AI-Centric Startups Apply Algorithms to Healthcare:Ayasdi, an AI-centric startup, has developed a machine intelligence platform based on topological data analysis and delivers its solutions to healthcare providers, primarily for patient risk assessment and reducing readmission rates. Other AI-focused startups in the healthcare sector include H2O.ai and Digital Reasoning Systems.