Indian health-tech artificial intelligence (AI) platform RedBrick AI has on Wednesday announced a $4.6 milion seed funding round to accelerate the development and adoption of artificial intelligence in clinical settings, through rapid data annotation on medical imagery.

The round was led by Surge, Sequoia Capital India, and Southeast Asia’s rapid scale-up program, with participation from Y Combinator and angels, RedBrick AI said in a statement.

“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,” RedBrick AI Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Shivam Sharma said.

RedBrick AI was launched in 2021 by Sharma, and Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Derek Lukacs. Both Shivam and Derek previously worked on SpaceX’s Hyperloop technology, and participated in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.

Sharma has a background in aerospace engineering and computer science from University of Michigan, while Lukacs holds a Bachelors and Masters in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan.

RedBrick AI is 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.

Teams building medical imaging AI use RedBrick AI to rapidly and collaboratively build high-quality training datasets.

The RedBrick AI software as a service (SaaS) platform offers high-performance web annotation tools for 2D and 3D data to give experts access to specialized tooling right from their browsers.

The RedBrick configurable workflow system helps teams build robust and scalable quality assurance processes. RedBrick AI offers a suite of APIs to help developers consume the annotations being created, and integrate with MLOps.

Its tools address several challenges unique to medical data annotation, such as the complexity of existing annotation tools, quality control and machine learning integration.

The platform’s specialized annotation tools can be accessed through the browser and are designed to be used without prior training. RedBrick AI also offers semi-automated tools to annotate complex 3D medical images.

RedBrick has a robust quality control process to ensure the quality of annotations, which are crucial to securing AI algorithm certifications from regulators.

It involves efficient quality control workflows on the platform that can compile the opinions of several clinicians per annotation case, all while dramatically reducing time spent on project management.

Its API also helps machine learning engineers integrate with their cloud and clinical data stores, for example, AWS or hospital enterprise PACS servers. The APIs are used to build ML data pipelines.

Surge is Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s rapid-scale up program. It combines up to $3 million of seed capital with company-building workshops, a global curriculum and support from a community of exceptional mentors and founders.

The program’s goal is to supercharge early-stage startups in India and Southeast Asia and give founders an unfair advantage, right out of the gate.

Sequoia helps daring founders build legendary companies, from idea to initial public offering (IPO) to beyond. Sequoia Capital India and Sequoia Capital Southeast Asia actively partner with founders from a wide range of companies, across categories, including BYJUs, CRED, Druva, Five Star Finance, Freshworks, GoTo, Groww, Kopi Kenangan, Mamaearth, Pine Labs, Polygon, Razorpay, Truecaller, Zomato and more.

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