In a move befitting its highland-dwelling namesake, Ibex Medical Analytics is building up a mountain of funding, which will help the tech developer expand the reach of its artificial-intelligence-powered cancer diagnostics.
The latest influx added $55 million to Ibex’s coffers. The Israeli startup announced the close of the series C this week, noting that it was led by 83North with additional backing from Sienna Venture Capital, Octopus Ventures, aMoon, Planven Entrepreneur Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital.
The financing about doubles Ibex’s total fundraising haul since its 2016 founding: Following a $38 million series B in early 2021, its $11 million series A in 2019 and a sprinkling of other funding outside of those formal rounds, the series C brings the company’s lifetime total past the $100 million milestone.
“We will be using the funds to expand our footprint in the United States to meet the increasing demand for AI-powered diagnostic solutions, and to accelerate the growth of our product portfolio to create more tools for pathologists and labs as they digitally transform their practices,” Joseph Mossel, Ibex’s CEO and co-founder, said in this week’s announcement.
That portfolio centers on the Galen platform, which uses deep learning AI algorithms to analyze pathology slides for signs of cancer with an aim of helping pathologists both increase their diagnostic accuracy and make their workflows more efficient.
To date, the Galen platform’s tools for spotting prostate, breast and gastric cancers have all earned CE mark clearance in Europe—in that order.
The newest of Ibex’s tools, Galen Gastric, was unveiled in 2021 and earned its CE mark about a year later. Like its predecessors, its algorithms were trained on more than 1 million biopsy slides to be able to identify potential signs of cancer as well as other issues in the GI tract.
And while Ibex’s technology still has yet to earn clearance for widespread use in the U.S., its AI solutions are already in use in a handful of hospitals around the country and are also on the FDA’s radar, as the Galen platform was granted breakthrough-device designation in mid-2021.
In the meantime, Ibex is not only developing new additions to the platform but also upgrading its existing diagnostic tools.
On the heels of the $55 million funding round this week, for example, the company announced Thursday the launch of Galen Breast HER2, which expands the original breast-cancer-spotting tool to add human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, or HER2, scoring.
Now, in addition to pinpointing potential tumors in breast biopsy samples and grading their severity, Ibex’s AI will also automatically calculate a HER2 immunohistochemistry score, all of which can then be reviewed and confirmed by a pathologist.
The HER2 tool, which was developed in collaboration with AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo, is aimed at improving diagnoses—since HER2 is traditionally evaluated visually—and better matching patients with the emerging class of HER2-targeting drugs.