Midtown-based Ataraxis is the latest pathology startup to attract backers using machine-learning diagnostics, raising $20 million in an early-stage venture capital round that recently closed, federal filings show.
The city’s abundance of large health systems has produced a cottage industry of AI-centered medical diagnostics companies that are raking in money from investors. The company uses computer algorithms to analyze large quantities of patient data and help diagnose certain diseases, with a focus on breast cancer.
The startup was co-founded by Dr. Jan Witowski, a physician and researcher focused on medical imaging, and Dr. Krzysztof Geras, his postdoctoral adviser at NYU, where he focused on AI in breast cancer imaging, according to Witowski’s website. The company had previously raised $4 million in seed funding from London-based Giant Ventures and San Francisco-based Obvious Ventures. Investors in the current round have not been disclosed.
Researchers hope the machine learning boom that has helped drive billions of dollars into the health-tech industry in recent years will help improve pathology, which often depends on catching abnormalities in patient tissue slides.
Ataraxis is one of several companies focusing on cancer diagnostics to spin out of collaborations with the city’s medical institutions in recent years, which have robust research arms and access to huge wells of patient data.
Hell’s Kitchen-based PreciseDx is an offshoot of Mount Sinai, co-founded by affiliates of the Icahn School of Medicine, that also uses AI to analyze breast cancer images and is trained on slides from Mount Sinai patients. In August, the company closed a $20.7 million Series B to advance clinical trials on a new breast cancer risk assessment.
Perhaps the largest of New York’s AI-diagnostic spinoffs is Paige, a startup founded by Memorial Sloan Kettering and trained with exclusive rights to its patient slides. That company got into trouble for enriching some of the nonprofit hospital’s leaders before it went on to raise another $214 million across three funding rounds, according to the research company PitchBook.
