harrison.ai, a Sydney-based company that creates medical devices that incorporate artificial intelligence technology, raised 129 million Australian dollars in what it says is one of the rounds of the Serie B largest ever for an Australian health technology company.
The funding was led by the investor, Horizons Ventures, and included new investors such as Sonic Healthcare and I-MED Radiology Network. Existing backers Blackbird Ventures and Skip Capital also entered for the round, bringing Harrison.ai's total raised over the past two years to $158 million Australian dollars.
harrison.ai announced that it has also formed a joint venture with Sonic Healthcare, one of the world's largest medical diagnostic providers, to develop and commercialize new clinical AI solutions in pathology. The association will focus first on histopathology, or the diagnosis of tissue diseases.
This is a line of work that has already been produced by another joint venture with harrison.ai and this time with I-MED Radiology in early 2020, creating Annalize.ai to develop AI-based radiology diagnostic support tools.
Dr. Aengus Tran, Executive Director of harrison.aiHe said that he became a doctor to help as many people as he could. "As I became more interested in artificial intelligence, I fell in love with the idea of using AI to help more people than I could ever have met in my life."
harrison.ai was started with his brother Dimitry to increase the global quality of healthcare by giving doctors AI-powered tools. Dr. Tran said that Annalize.ai was able to launch its first regulatory-approved product in 18 months, an artificial intelligence tool that detects clinical features in chest X-rays.
The capital will also be applied to hiring more AI data scientists and engineers and forming clinical partnerships around the world to expand into new areas of healthcare. harrison.ai says its AI-based technology can help improve the diagnostic process in places where there is a shortage of health care.
“COVID has intensified inequities and struggles that the global health system was already in, especially in critical areas like radiology and pathology,” said Dr. Tran. “Over the last decade, we have seen a critical shortage of radiologists in developed or developing markets, and that has only worsened as COVID caused further skills shortages and a backlog of procedures and requirements.”
He added that the technology based on artificial intelligence of harrison.ai it is designed to help augment health care systems. but not to replace doctors. “We are giving them the tools to make critical healthcare decisions quickly and effectively, with the help of artificial intelligence.”
harrison.ai It currently has teams in Australia, the UK and Vietnam, and plans to expand to other countries soon. Its products are prepared and approved for the market in Australia, the United Kingdom, Europe and some other Asian countries, said Dr. Tran. The company's goal is to expand into other markets, with the goal of helping one million patients a day.
