Health tech firm lands £3.8M funding to “accelerate” AI in healthcare

A leading health tech and AI company has announced a major $4.6M (£3.8M) funding round to accelerate the development and adoption of artificial intelligence in clinical settings, through rapid data annotation on medical imagery.

AI-based platform RedBrick AI says the new funding will be channelled into expanding the company’s suite of specialised tooling, and to grow its customer base.

Led by Surge, Sequoia Capital India, and Southeast Asia’s rapid scale-up program, with participation from Y Combinator and angels, the round will also lead to an “acceleration” in AI in healthcare.

Improving diagnostics and patient care through AI

Researchers and healthcare institutions are increasingly investing in AI solutions to improve diagnostics, treatment and patient quality of care.

The use of AI in healthcare stands to transform patient care by boosting clinician productivity and automating clinical diagnosis. In 2021 alone, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 115 AI algorithms for use in medical environments, an 83% increase from 2018.

Training AI

However, researchers cannot use medical images to train AI systems until they are cleaned and expertly annotated. Training an AI system also requires hundreds of annotated medical images and thousands of hours of annotation by clinicians.

Due to the complexity, size, and unique nature of medical images, clinicians have to resort to traditional and difficult-to-use clinical tools to perform annotations.

RedBrick AI is thus laser focused on solving the first key challenge to healthcare AI adoption – providing clinicians high-quality data annotation tools that accelerate the preparation of training datasets.

CEO and co-founder Shivam Sharma commented: “Working with leading healthcare AI teams over the past year has been an incredible journey and learning opportunity.

“With the rapid growth of artificial intelligence in clinical settings, researchers need excellent tools to build high-quality datasets and models at scale. Our customers are in the vanguard of this growth, pioneering everything from surgical robots to automated detection of cancers.

“We are incredibly excited to use the funds we’ve raised to power the next generation of researchers in building AI for clinical settings.”