Image credit: Red AI
In 2017, Vinod Khosla told CNBC that “the radiologist job will be gone in five years.” While the founder of Khosla Ventures later revised. That timeline up to 15 yearshe maintained that AI image recognition could soon diagnose disease on scans better than human doctors.
Seven years later, radiologists still need to interpret most scans (even if AI software helps them). A more immediate challenge is the shortage of these doctors. United States And around the world.
While Khosla Ventures has backed several imaging startups, including Vista.ai And Q Biothe firm's latest bet is on a company that eases radiologists' workloads by reducing time spent documenting reports rather than trying to replace the doctor with a machine.
On Tuesday, Khosla led a $50 million Series B in RedAI, which developed a tool that can generate reports for radiologists. Other participants in the round included World Innovation Lab and returning investors ARTIS Ventures, OCV Partners, Kickstart Fund and Gradient Ventures (Google's AI-focused fund). The financing brings the company's total capitalization to more than $80 million.
Rad AI was founded in 2018 by Dr. Jeff Chang, who completed his medical training as a radiologist at the age of 16 and later earned an MBA from UCLA, and serial entrepreneur Dr. Gorson.
Because Chang knew from his experience as a practicing physician that radiologists spend most of their time documenting results rather than analyzing images, the pair automated the documentation of physician findings and impressions. Decided to develop a proprietary LLM trained on radiology report datasets to generate
While tech companies didn't make widespread use of generative AI until OpenAI's ChatGPT hit the scene in 2022, Rad AI is proud to be an early adopter of the technology. “I believe we are the first company in radiology to start using LLMs,” Gerson, CEO of Rad AI, told TechCrunch. “We started doing this in 2018, around the same time that OpenAI was creating them. [first] Models.”
Six years later, Rad AI products are used by about a third of U.S. health systems and nine of the nation's ten largest radiology groups, Gorson said.
The fresh capital will be used to build a team that deploys Rad AI's latest product: a standalone radiology reporting solution.
“We have a lot of interest, but there's only so much we can deploy at once,” Gorson said, adding that Rad AI is hiring people who can install and maintain the software. are
Some incumbents have been trying to add GenAI functionality to their radiology reporting software for the past 18 months, but Rad AI doesn't consider these companies to be a true competitor yet.
“Right now, 99% to 100% of the market probably uses our products,” he said. “If it's any indication, we haven't lost a single customer since we started.”