Philadelphia medical technology company Proscia raised a $37 million Series C funding round, doubling what it has taken in from investors since its inception eight years ago.
Founded in 2014 by a team of biomedical engineers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Pittsburgh, the company uses artificial intelligence to improve how pathologists diagnose cancer.
The company's software platform Concentriq is designed to take the vast amounts of data contained in pathology slides, which have previously been difficult to access and analyze at scale, and help pathologists better diagnose and research diseases.
Proscia's Series C round was led Highline Capital Management, Triangle Peak Partners and Alpha Intelligence Capital. Existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Hitachi Ventures, ROBO Global, Emerald Development Managers, Razor’s Edge Ventures and Philadelphia-based Robin Hood Ventures also participated in the round.
The company raised $23 million in a 2020 Series B financing led by California-based Scale Venture. It's now raised $72 million in total.
David West, Proscia's co-founder and CEO, said the funding will be used by the company to invest in product development, further scale its commercial operations, accelerate the adoption of computational pathology, and to expand its workforce.
The company currently has about 100 employees, West said, and it expects to add another 40 over the next six months.
"We'll be hiring like crazy in Philadelphia," he said. Proscia is headquartered at 1700 Market St. in Center City.
West said the new hires will include engineers, product designers, regulatory experts, marketing personnel and customer service specialists.
“Pathology deserves the same revolutionary technology that has transformed the rest of medicine and our lives,” West said. “Our Series C will enable us to continue delivering [the company's technology] to the scientists and pathologists who are using it to improve patient outcomes."
Proscia uses modern computing technologies to "unlock hidden data" not visible to the human eye, and turns that data into valuable insights in the fight against cancer. The company's technology helps pathology labs become faster, more consistent and more accurate. Its cloud-based platform featuring software incorporates artificial intelligence to take some of the subjective analysis out of the analysis process. The system evaluates an image, identifies problem areas and makes distinctions such as whether the patient has a basal cell carcinoma — which is highly treatable when caught early — or a more serious melanoma. The system also allows images to be analyzed by different people simultaneously at locations around the world.
The company's clients include half of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies along with leading reference laboratories and health systems including University of Pennsylvania Health System and Johns Hopkins Medicine. It also works with the Joint Pathology Center, the pathology reference center for the U.S. government and the oldest tissue repository in the country, which hired Proscia to digitize its 55 million glass slides and 31 million blocks of tissue.
