CHF 2.3M investment for bringing Artificial Intelligence to Health Data

RetinAI, a Bern based company building software tools to aggregate, manage, and analyze health data, has closed a CHF 2.3M pre-Series A financing round. btov Partners' Industrial Technologies Fund has led the round with participation of Swiss-based investor network Investiere and a consortium of selected private investors. The investment will support RetinAI’s growth and international expansion. Further, the funds will contribute to growing the team and accelerating certification initiatives. This brings the company closer to becoming a market reference in the field of healthcare AI.

Today, healthcare is under the pressure of an ever-increasing aging population, growing much faster than the number of health professionals. As a result, waiting time in hospitals increases and, for age-related eye diseases, intensifies the risk of patients losing their eyesight in a malignancy where timing and early diagnosis are crucial.

RetinAI's "Discovery Platform" makes eye clinics and health institutions more efficient by offering Artificial Intelligence analytics capabilities. The software enables easy integration of algorithms into clinical and research workflows for Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD), Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), Glaucoma and for monitoring other neuropathological disorders like Alzheimer, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson, etc. Thereby the software solution fosters the transition from reactive to precision and patient-specific medicine. The company integrates its solutions inside the clinic or the pharma server infrastructure and into medical devices, interconnecting the whole clinical pipeline and reducing the time and cost it takes to evaluate patients. This enables doctors to do more in the same amount of time.

The last months of the company have been very successful with multiple contracts signed with large pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers and the release of the company's first products ( Omniviewer , Discovery ). Furthermore, the company has received several prestigious grants between December 2018 and January 2019 with more than CHF 550K in non-dilutive funding from European (EUROSTARS EU Program) and Swiss (SPHN - Swiss Personalized Healthcare Network) institutions. These grants support the development of new deep Artificial Intelligence technologies and applications.

Christian Schütz , partner of the Industrial Technologies Fund states: "We are very convinced of the quality and experience of the team in the field of advanced machine learning and medical imaging technologies. RetinAI's platform provides tools to structure, analyze and visualize eye examinations while offering a biomarker-based analysis and thus the avoidance of a “black box” interpretation of data. Their algorithms allow for clear precision and patient-specific treatment, creating an immense value to Pharma and clinics alike. We believe that RetinAI has the potential to become one of the leading enablers of AI on medical information". More about the Industrial Fund in a separet article. 

"One of the biggest issues you find in health institutions is the lack of structure in data originating from medical devices or electronic health records. This situation makes it complicated to identify patterns related to an eye condition in a reasonable amount of time. At RetinAI we bring data organisation and analysis to the next level, digesting and funneling information using our algorithms and presenting it to the user in a rich manner. As a result, clinicians can reach conclusions and take actions faster than ever before. We believe that by combining health data and technology we can transform the field and break the technological barriers that separate patients from the precise treatment they deserve." says RetinAI's CEO, Dr. Carlos Ciller.

(Press release)