AIgnostics raises US$34m in Series B financing

Berlin-based Charité and Mayo Clinic spin-out Aignostics GmbH has raised US$34m in a Series B financing led by two German investors, Athos, the financing vehicle of the Hexal founders Thomas and Andreas Strüngmann, and the Hightech Gründer Fonds (HTGF), a German public-private investment fund set up in 2005. The new investment, which was supported by existing investors Wellington Partners, Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, CARMA Fund, IBB Ventures, and the Mayo Clinic,  brings the total funds raised by the AI image analysis specialist to US$55m. The company is an AI specialist in integrating digital image analysis data with epidemiological, clinical and genomic data in order to fully understand genotype/phenotype relationships and to drive the discovery and delivery of personalised medicine.

With the new proceeds, the digital pathology company will strengthen its product and service portfolio for target and/or and companion diagnostics (CDx)  identification, including tumour microenvironment and biomarker profiling. Aignostics, which is headquarted in Berlin and has R&D site in New York, plans to grow in the US, and use its established RudolfV foundation model to generate novel realworld data-driven models and and biopharma product offerings in collaboriation with Mayo Clinic.

In January, Aignostics researchers reported a novel approach to designing foundation models for computational pathology, incorporating pathologist expertise, semi-automated data curation, and a diverse dataset from more than 15 laboratories, including 58 tissue types, and encompassing 129 different histochemical and immuno-histochemical staining modalities. They demonstrate that RudolfV surpassed existing state-of-the-art foundation models across different benchmarks focused on tumour microenvironment profiling, biomarker evaluation, and reference case search while exhibiting favourable robustness properties.

“2024 has been a pivotal year for us that has included a major strategic collaboration with Bayer and the launch of our first foundation model, RudolfV,” said Viktor Matyas, CEO and Co-Founder of Aignostics. “With RudolfV, we’ve gained the ability to quickly develop cost-efficient algorithms that generalise to the real-world. Now with this new round of funding, we’re turning our most popular algorithms into products that will help usher in an era of truly generalisable AI for computational pathology.”

Aignostics was set up in 2018 to turn complex multimodal pathology data into resonable products for drug and CDx development.