Australia-based artificial intelligence-powered healthcare company Harrison.ai closed its A$29m ($19.8m) yesterday having raised funding from investors including care provider Ramsay Health Care.
Blackbird Ventures led the round, which also included fellow venture capital firm Horizons Ventures and investment fund Skip Capital.
Harrison is developing artificial intelligence-based applications in partnership with established healthcare businesses.
The company’s first collaboration is with assisted reproductive services provider Virtus Health, for which it created an algorithm called Ivy to select the most viable embryo during in-vitro fertilisation. Ivy achieved a 93% success rate in a preclinical trial involving about 1,600 patients and 10,000 embryos.
Harrison has since signed a second deal with medical imaging services provider I-Med to launch a joint venture, Annalise.ai, that is intended to improve the efficiency and accuracy of diagnoses based on X-ray scans and, in the longer term, mammography and CT scans.
The company is currently concentrating on Australia, but hopes to eventually expand into Asian markets including Vietnam, from where its co-founders hail, and Malaysia, as well as entering the US and Europe.
The funding will support the recruitment of data science and software engineering staff and the development of new applications.
Harrison.ai co-founder Dimitry Tran said: “Australia leads the world in many areas of healthcare. We have home-grown organisations that went on to become the world’s largest in their domains, such as Ramsay Health Care in hospital, Virtus Health in fertility and I-Med in radiology.
“This presents a great opportunity for technology development and global distribution. At Harrison.ai, a key part of our strategy moving forward is to collaborate with such organisations to develop AI-as-medical-device solutions that improve efficiency, accuracy and safety, ultimately enhancing patient outcomes.”
