Qritive, a Singapore-based healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) startup has on Monday announced that it has raised $7.5 million in a funding round led by MassMutual Ventures.

The round was also supported by SEEDS Capital, the investment arm of Enterprise Singapore, and Exfinity Venture Partners, Qritive said in a statement.

According to the statement, Qritive will use this new capital to drive geographical expansion, expand product portfolio and support regulatory clearances.

Founded in 2017 by Dr. Aneesh Sathe and Dr. Kaveh Taghipour, Qritive today has presence in Singapore, United States, and India.

Using artificial intelligence, Qritive solutions provide fast and accurate interpretations of pathology whole slide images scans within seconds, reducing time to treatment, increasing accuracy for cancer care.

In an environment where 70 percent of the pathologists are concentrated in just 10 countries, leaving 47 percent of the world population without basic access to diagnostics, the transition to digital pathology is becoming increasingly critical in the agenda of healthcare systems.

In this context, Qritive brings clinical-grade AI-powered solutions to enable histopathology diagnosis of cancer at scale.

These clinical-decision support tools help improve efficiency and quality in diagnosis, which will ultimately result in better patient outcome.

As Aneesh Sathe, Chief Executive Officer of Qritive, put it: “Complexity of diagnostics has increased considerably and having tools that increase accuracy and throughput really fast has become instrumental for clinicians worldwide.”

Qritive’s solutions are CE certified and also approved by Singapore Health Sciences Authority (HSA) for clinical use.

Its technology helps accelerate cancer diagnosis across multiple cancer types including colon, prostate, lymph node and includes a robust set of tools for immunohistochemistry.

Qritive’s Pantheon digital pathology platform is a one of a kind platform that brings together tools for case management, reporting, slide viewing and analysis, telepathology, synoptic reporting, and LIS integration.

Qritive’s solutions are vendor agnostic and aim to create an open ecosystem for digital pathology, enabling easy integration with third party products.

“Qritive’s platform digitises and streamlines the pathology workflow from end-to-end, supporting clinicians with a wide range of tools – including image analysis, case management, and reporting modules,

“With an international network of pathologists, Qritive is uniquely positioned to accelerate the adoption of digital pathology across the globe. We look forward to supporting Qritive’s growth and the meaningful work that it is doing to improve patient outcomes,” said Ryan Collins, Managing Director at MassMutual Ventures.

Meanwhile, SEEDS Capital General Manager Tan Kaixin said despite increasing cancer prevalence and the strain it places on healthcare systems, the utilisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in improving cancer diagnosis is still in relatively early stages of adoption by clinicians.

“We are happy to support Qritive as it commercialises its digital pathology software, leveraging AI developed and validated in collaboration with the Singapore General Hospital (SGH). This will help close the industry gap not just in Singapore, but in other Asian and Western markets,” he added.

Exfinity Venture Partners Managing Partner Chinnu Senthilkumar said the prevalence of cancer is rising globally, and by 2030, Asia will account for nearly half of all cancer cases worldwide.

“Speed and accuracy are of utmost importance, especially in the backdrop of a severe pathologist shortage. The clinical-grade AI-powered technology from Qritive leads to NextGen diagnosis by being disruptive, accurate, removing existing bottlenecks, and supporting pathologists at every stage,” he added.

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