NEW YORK – Ataraxis AI, a New York City-based company applying artificial intelligence to digital pathology testing to improve cancer prognosis and treatment selection, said on Wednesday that it has received $20.4 million in Series A financing.
Participants in the financing round included Floating Point, Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Bertelsmann Investments, and existing investors Giant Ventures and Obvious Venture. The round also received backing from angel investors including Mario Schlosser, cofounder and former CEO of Oscar Health and Ryan Fukushima, chief operating officer of Tempus, as well as researchers from OpenAI and DeepMind.
Ataraxis AI spun out of New York University in 2023, and was cofounded by Jan Witowski, previously a postdoc at NYU Langone Health, Harvard Medical School, and Massachusetts General Hospital, and Krzysztof Geras, a professor specializing in machine learning at NYU.
The company has developed an AI foundation model called Kestrel, which the company said outperforms existing approaches by uncovering complex, previously undetectable patterns linked to patient outcomes across all disease types. Kestrel is the first of Ataraxis' foundation models designed to help develop treatment selection tools for all cancer types.
Ataraxis AI will use the new funding to bring to market its first offering, Ataraxis Breast, an AI-native prognostic/predictive platform for breast cancer. In an unpublished study, researchers from the company found that Ataraxis Breast had a 30 percent greater accuracy for predicting cancer recurrence than Exact Sciences' molecular Oncotype DX assay and was able to reclassify patients rated as having intermediate risk by Oncotype DX into low- or high-risk groups.
The company said that it is aiming to launch Ataraxis Breast for clinical oncology use later this year in the US. The new financing will the company develop additional capabilities within and beyond breast cancer and to develop next-generation AI foundation models.
"This investment is a testament to the groundbreaking work our team is accomplishing and the immense potential of AI in precision medicine, Witowski said in a statement. "It also reflects our progress, securing funding just a few months after receiving clinical validation. With this capital, we are on track to further accelerate our mission to change how cancer is treated and ultimately impact at least 50 percent of new cancer cases by 2030."
In conjunction with the financing, the company also announced new members of its clinical advisory board including Francisco Esteva, chief of hematology and medical oncology at Northwell Lenox Hill; Lajos Pusztai co-Leader of the genetics, genomics and epigenetics program at Yale Cancer Center; Adam Brufsky, codirector of the Cancer Therapeutics Program at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center; and Freya Schnabel, director of breast surgery at NYU. These additions join Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, who serves as the company's AI advisor.