In 2017, Vinod Khosla told CNBC that the profession “of radiologist will be obsolete in five years”. While the Khosla Ventures founder later revised this period can reach 15 yearshe argued that AI image recognition could soon diagnose diseases on scanners better than human doctors.
Seven years later, radiologists still have to interpret most exams (even if AI software helps them); the most immediate challenge is the shortage of these doctors in the UNITED STATES And around the world.
While Khosla Ventures has backed several imaging startups, including Vista.ai And Q BioThe company’s latest bet is on a company that would ease radiologists’ workload by reducing the time spent documenting reports, instead of trying to replace the doctor with a machine.
On Tuesday, Khosla led a $50 million Series B in Rad AI, which developed a tool capable of generating reports for radiologists. Other participants in the round included World Innovation Lab and legacy investors ARTIS Ventures, OCV Partners, Kickstart Fund and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused fund). The financing brought the company’s total capital to more than $80 million.
Rad AI was founded in 2018 by Dr. Jeff Chang, who completed his medical training as a radiologist at the age of 16 and went on to earn an MBA from UCLA, and by serial entrepreneur Doktor Gurson.
Since Chang knew from his own experience as a practicing physician that the majority of radiologists’ time is spent documenting results rather than analyzing images, the two decided to develop a proprietary LLM trained on Radiology reporting datasets to automate documentation of results and physician impressions.
While tech companies did not widely use generative AI until the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, Rad AI is proud to be an early adopter of the technology. “I am confident that we are the first radiology company to start using LLMs,” Rad AI CEO Gurson told TechCrunch. “We started doing this work in 2018, around the same time that open AI was creating its [first] models.”
Six years later, Rad AI’s products are used by about a third of U.S. health systems and nine of the nation’s 10 largest radiology groups, Gurson said.
The new capital will be used to build a team that will deploy Rad AI’s latest product: a standalone radiology reporting solution.
“We’re very interested, but we can only deploy a few things at a time,” Gurson said, adding that Rad AI is recruiting people who can install and maintain the software.
Some incumbents have attempted to add GenAI functionality to their radiology reporting software over the past 18 months, but Rad AI does not yet view these companies as true competitors.
“Right now, probably 99 to 100 percent of the market is using our products,” he said. “If it’s any indication, we haven’t lost a single customer since we started.”
