Centaur Labs, a medical data labeling company, announced $15 million in a Series A funding round.
Matrix Partners led the round with participation from other funds, including Accel, Global Founders Capital, Susa Ventures, Y Combinator, and individual investors including John Capodilupo (founder and CTO of WHOOP), Tom Lee (founder of One Medical), and Elliot Cohen (founder and CPO of PillPack).
The company plans to use the new funds to expand its global network of labelers and accelerate product development and hiring.
“AI learns like humans – by example – and to train an algorithm, it takes thousands or even millions of examples. It is difficult to curate large medical datasets and nearly impossible to source accurate labels from those with medical knowledge and specialized training,” said Erik Duhaime, co-founder, and CEO of Centaur Labs. “Our platform is built to support a wide range of specialized medical tasks and to scale to millions of labels quickly.”
Centaur provides annotations for medical AI startups like Eko Health, which uses recordings of heart and lung sounds to train AI algorithms for their stethoscope technology, and for researchers at medical institutions such as Brigham and Women’s Hospital which is leveraging ultrasound data for new AI applications.
“Centaur’s technology doesn’t just offer data labels; it rethinks the medical second opinion and harnesses a network of trusted experts,” said Stan Reiss, Partner at Matrix Partners. “The ability for AI to make an impact in healthcare depends on the ability to solve the data labeling bottleneck, and Centaur will catalyze the development and adoption of AI solutions throughout the industry.”
Digital Health companies in the first half (1H) of 2021 raised $15 billion; the funding activity was up by 138% during 1H 2021, compared to $6.3 billion raised in 1H 2020, according to the latest Mercom Digital Health Funding and M&A Report.