Imagene AI, a company that builds advanced AI models for precision medicine, has raised $23 million in its Series B funding round. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, led the round.
With this new funding, the company has now raised a total of $45 million. Existing investor Aguras Pathology Investments also took part in this round.
Founded in 2020 by Dean Bitan, Jonathan Zalach, and Shahar Porat, Imagene AI employs 30 people, most of whom are based in Israel, with the remainder in the United States.
“We plan to expand our offering to more locations and to grow our activities in the pharmaceutical world, because we want to see more patients receiving personalized treatments, and we aim to help companies develop better drugs,” said Dean Bitan, the company’s CEO.
“This is Larry Ellison’s second investment in the company. He’s a very special person, and we share a vision for what we want to achieve. For him, this is not just another investment; he’s very involved, even to the level of personally looking for technological solutions to problems related to integrating different disciplines.”
Bitan says that several pharmaceutical companies are already using the AI “brain” developed by Imagene. It helps improve clinical trials and makes personalized medicine more accurate and tailored to each patient.
“One of the first products we brought to market is a system that analyses biopsy images to identify cancer mutations, ensuring patients receive the most effective treatment,” Bitan said. “We’ve announced a collaboration with Tempus, the largest testing provider in the U.S., which will distribute our test and work with hospitals in Israel.”
At the core of Imagene AI’s platform is a system that performs real-time analysis and learns from a wide range of clinical and biological sources. Biopsy images, genomic profiles, and clinical data are processed by advanced AI models, large language models, and proprietary biological analysis engines developed by the company.
“Our system is like what OpenAI did for language models, but in our world of medicine and biology, where information is far less accessible,” Bitan said. “We’ve collected extensive clinical and medical data and fed it into our ‘brain,’ which can be asked all kinds of questions.
“For example, the model can predict when a disease might return. It’s a living system that constantly learns from new information and grows in capability. We can help make every clinical trial faster and every treatment more successful.
“Our foundation is to build a core model that ingests diverse data and provides an infrastructure for pharma companies to run better, more successful experiments.”
“Imagene AI’s ability to unite imaging, omics, and clinical data in a single foundation model is exactly the kind of breakthrough we believe will drive the next generation of drugs and diagnostics,” said Larry Ellison, Oracle Chairman and CTO. “Their approach opens the door to a more adaptive, biologically fluent era of precision medicine.”
Imagene AI is growing its partnerships to make its AI-based tests more widely available. This includes working with Tempus to offer its lung cancer detection test across the U.S.
The test is also being used in top hospitals in Israel, like Ichilov and Sheba Tel Hashomer. These tests help doctors quickly make important decisions about treatment and diagnosis by deeply analysing just biopsy images in a matter of minutes.
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