Proscia, an AI-powered digital computational pathology platform, secured $23 million in Series B funding, bringing the company’s funding total to $35 million.
The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Hitachi Ventures, the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Hitachi.
The company plans to use the new funds to accelerate its growth and strengthen its digital cancer research and diagnosis. The company will also use the funds to accelerate commercial expansion, ramping up its sales, marketing, and support teams.
According to the company, its software platform helps laboratories, health systems, and life sciences companies acquire digital pathology information, unlock new insights, accelerate breakthroughs, and improve patient outcomes. The company’s customer includes Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Joint Pathology Center (JPC), the U.S. government’s pathology reference center.
“Digitization has swept through almost every domain of healthcare, and we are now seeing its revolutionary impact on pathology,” said Alexander Niehenke, Partner at Scale Venture Partners. “Proscia is a high-growth company with a unique platform-plus-AI approach that is enabling it to capitalize on a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity. We’re excited to be a part of Proscia’s success as it expands its leadership position in pathology’s shift from analog to digital.”
According to the company data, in the U.S. alone, pathologists have faced a 42% rise in diagnostic workload over the last decade, a challenge that will continue to intensify as the total number of cancer cases is projected to increase by 55% by 2030.
Recently, laboratories have been implementing digital pathology to maintain operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, as digitization is the only means by which they can continue to serve patients, the company said.
“Digital pathology is quickly becoming the expected standard of diagnosis,” said Steve Holloway, Company Director & Principal Analyst at Signify Research. “The global pandemic has exacerbated longstanding pressures, accelerating adoption. This market has now crossed an inflection point, with a critical mass of digital laboratories creating the momentum for more widespread implementation of digital pathology and augmentation by artificial intelligence.”
Healthcare data analytics companies raised $1.3 billion in the first nine months of 2020, according to the latest Mercom Digital Health Funding report. Recently, Oncology data curation and analytics platform COTA Healthcare raised $10 million from Varian Medical Technology.
