Harrison.ai founder Harrison.ai founder Dimitry Tran, Dr. Colin Goldschmidt and Dr. Aengus Tran Photo by Stefanie Zingsheim / The Photo Pitch
Harrison.ai, a Sydney-based company that makes medical devices using AI technology, announced today that it has won A $ 129 million (about $ 92.3 million) in one of the largest Series B rounds of all time for an Australian startup.
The funding was led by returning investor Horizons Ventures and included the participation of new investors Sonic Healthcare and I-MED Radiology Network. Existing funders Blackbird Ventures and Skip Capital also returned for the round, raising Harrison.ai a total of A $ 158 million over the past two years.
Harrison.ai also announced that it has formed a joint venture with Sonic Healthcare, one of the world’s largest providers of medical diagnostics, to develop and commercialize new clinical AI solutions in pathology. The partnership will initially focus on histopathology or the diagnosis of tissue diseases.
This follows another joint venture, Harrison.ai, which was founded in early 2020 with I-MED Radiology and founded Annalize.ai to develop AI-based tools to support radiology diagnostics.
Dr. Harrison.ai CEO Aengus Tran told TechCrunch that he became a doctor to help as many people as possible. “As I became more involved with artificial intelligence, I fell in love with the idea of using AI to help more people than I could in my entire life.”
Harrison.ai was founded with his brother Dimitry to scale the global quality of healthcare by providing AI-powered tools for clinicians. Dr. Tran said that within 18 months, Annalize.ai was able to launch its first regulatory product, an AI tool that detects clinical findings on chest x-rays.
The funds will also be used to hire more AI data scientists and engineers, and forge clinical partnerships around the world to expand into new health areas. Harrison.ai says its AI-based technology can help improve the diagnostic process in places where there is a healthcare shortage.
“COVID has exacerbated the injustices and struggles that the global health system has already suffered from, particularly in critical areas such as radiology and pathology,” said Dr. Tran. “Over the past decade and beyond, we have seen a critical shortage of radiologists in both developed and developing markets, and it has only worsened as COVID continued to create skills shortages and lag in electoral processes and requirements.”
He added that Harrison.ai’s AI-powered technology is designed to scale healthcare systems, not replace clinicians. “We give them the tools to use artificial intelligence to make critical decisions in healthcare quickly and on a large scale.”
Harrison.ai currently has teams in Australia, the UK and Vietnam and plans to expand to other countries soon. Its products are ready for the market in Australia, the UK, Europe and some Asian countries, said Dr. Tran. The company’s goal is to expand into other markets with the aim of serving one million patients every day.
