Israel’s Zebra raises $30m from billionaires Nacht, Kahn for x-ray reads
Startup uses machine learning to analyze data from scans, produces medical reports with 90% accuracy
Shoshanna Solomon was The Times of Israel's Startups and Business reporter
Zebra Medical Vision, an Israeli startup that uses machine learning technology to read and analyze data from CT and x-ray scans, said it has raised $30 million in a C round of funding.
The latest funding round, which brings the amount of money raised by the company to date to $50 million, was led by aMoon Partners, an Israeli life-sciences venture capital firm that is backed by billionaire Marius Nacht. Other strategic healthcare investors were Aurum Ventures, owned by the South Africa-born Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn, Johnson & Johnson Innovation JJDC Inc., Intermountain Healthcare, and AI experts Fei Fei Lee and Richard Socher.
These new investors joined existing funders Khosla Ventures, Nvidia, Marc Benioff, OurCrowd and Dolby Ventures, who also participated in the C round, according to a statement published Thursday.
Zebra Medical Vision operates in the growing market of AI-based tools for radiology. The company has received the European CE regulatory mark for seven of its products, as well as approvals in a number of countries across Latin America and Asia. Zebra’s online software, called Profound, reads data from CT scans, analyzes the information and produces medical reports with 90 percent accuracy, the company said.
Also on Thursday, Zebra said that a comprehensive study on the ability of its technology to read chest x-rays automatically showed “high rates of agreement between the algorithm and human radiologist experts.”
The chest x-ray AI analytics product was trained using nearly 2 million images to identify 40 common clinical findings, the company said.
“Medical experts worldwide are facing a critical challenge in handling overwhelming demand. We are excited to partner with the Zebra team, which is harnessing the power of data and machine learning to provide physicians and healthcare systems with tools to dramatically increase capacity, while improving patient care,” said Yair Schindel, Managing Partner at aMoon VC. “This investment aligns with our vision of backing scalable and sustainable innovations that will have a valuable impact on fundamental facets of global healthcare.”
“I am a big believer in AI based healthcare solutions and Zebra’s technologies will play a major role in improving the capacity and quality of treatment for patients all over the world,” said Morris Kahn, the founder and owner of Aurum Ventures.