Deep Lens, a digital pathology company that emerged from stealth mode with $3.2 million last fall, has closed a $14 million Series A round of financing. The company said this brings its total funding to $17.5 million.
Northpond Ventures led the Series A round, and existing investors Rev1 Ventures, Sierra Ventures and Tamarind-Hill Partners also participated.
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The Columbus, Ohio-based company said it intends to use the money to advance its AI-driven platform and scale its sales and marketing efforts to support continued growth.
“We will also add to the software development team to ensure that VIPER is the premier platform for AI-driven, digital pathology workflows and clinical trial recruitment,” Deep Lens co-founder and president Simon Arkell said via email.
The aforementioned VIPER (Virtual Imaging for Pathology Education and Research) tool is the company’s flagship technology. It is a cloud-based digital pathology platform that unites AI and advanced pathology workflows while also enabling peer-to-peer and pathologist-to-patient collaboration.
The platform was originally developed for research purposes. Over the course of a decade, the technology was used and refined by various pathologists. Eventually, Deep Lens exclusively licensed VIPER and its image analysis methods.
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The goal of VIPER is to help pathologists during clinical trial recruitment. VIPER can pinpoint eligible patients at the time of their diagnosis, thereby increasing the speed of trial recruitment.
The tool has been used on various research projects and at institutions like Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cleveland Clinic. It is now freely available to pathologists across the globe.
Arkell noted that his startup has signed on multiple institutional customers who will deploy VIPER. The Ohio company has also launched agreements with biopharma clients who can utilize VIPER for clinical trial purposes.
“We are making VIPER free of charge and entering into partnership agreements with all of our institutional users so that we, and they, can benefit from the value add we will provide to the biopharma industry together,” Arkell noted. “Our biopharma customers are prepared to pay to have us help solve problems associated with drug development and clinical trial recruitment, and Deep Lens is on the forefront of that initiative.”
Picture: claudenakagawa, Getty Images
