Qure.ai raises $40 million to expand its presence in US and Europe

• Qure.ai has raised $40 million in a round led by Novo Holdings and HealthQuad.
• It will use the latest funding to further strengthen its global reach.
• It reads a patient's X-rays and other scans to detect brain trauma and diagnoses chest diseases.

Healthtech startup Qure.ai — a company that uses artificial intelligence for medical image diagnostics — has raised $40 million in a funding round led by Novo Holdings and HealthQuad. MassMutual Ventures also participated in this round.

The company will use the latest funding to further strengthen its global reach, especially in the United States of America (USA) and Europe. The company also wants to further intensify product development for critical care and community diagnostics.

Founded by Prashant Warrier and Dr. Pooja Rao in 2016, Qure.ai has developed a technology that reads a patient's X-rays and other scans to detect brain trauma and diagnoses chest diseases. The company had also implemented the same technology to detect COVID-19.

The company believes that its automated medical imaging tools can shorten the time to diagnosis, while enabling physicians to manage medical cases more effectively.

The company had also implemented the same technology in a small hospital in the Tezpur town of Assam to detect strokes and concussions in the region. Strokes are one of the major causes of death in the Assamese region. About 150 people are affected by strokes in Assam every day and 54,890 on a yearly basis, according to a study released by a local hospital GNRC in 2018.

The company’s chief exec (CEO) Warrier explained that there are two parts to their artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled deep learning solution — the gateway and the application programming interface (API).

The gateway are the x-ray machines, the computed tomography (CT) scan machines, ultrasound machines and others that collect the inputs from the healthcare centres and transfer it to the cloud. The API, then, scans, processes and creates a radiology report based on their algorithm. The report is then sent to the patients and the doctors directly.

Notably, the company anonymises all the data before sending it from gateway to API to maintain users’ privacy. Qure's AI solutions are FDA-approved, CE-certified, and evaluated by the World Health Organization (WHO).

"Every year our technology helps more than four million people across 50 countries. Our goal is to continue being bullish in our market expansion, especially in the US and Europe. We are committed to aiding healthcare professionals in diagnosing illnesses faster and with more detail and accuracy while automating most of the routine work,” Warrier said in a statement.

Qure.ai has raised over $60 million to date, according to business intelligence platform Crunchbase. It counts Sequoia Capital India, MassMutual Ventures and Fractal Analytics as investors.

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