San Francisco-based Artificial intelligence startup Viz.ai has reached unicorn status with a valuation of $1.2 billion, leaders announced Thursday.
The milestone arrives after the company collected $100 million in its fourth round of funding and the number of hospitals using its platform surpassed 1,000. New York investment firms Insight Partners and Tiger Global Management pitched in the lion’s share, with additional contributions from several other early backers.
Co-founded in 2016 by neurosurgeon Chris Mansi, MD, MBA, Viz.ai offers a suite of solutions for diagnosing a variety of acute and emergent diseases via medical images. Last year, Forbes named the firm one of the “Next Billion-Dollar Startups,” and in 2020 leaders said they were the first to score Medicare coverage for an AI algorithm.
“Viz.ai is the standout AI healthcare company,” John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global, said in a statement. “We see meaningful upside as [Viz.ai] expands to help life science companies expedite clinical trials and accelerate patient access to new effective treatments.”
Mansi and colleagues said they would use the new funds to support their “significant” growth trajectory, add additional customers, and expand the Viz Platform to detect and triage additional diseases. Currently, the portfolio includes medical imaging algorithms for pinpointing suspected large vessel occlusion strokes, intracranial hemorrhages, pulmonary embolisms and aortic diseases, among other offerings. U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance is also pending for an additional algorithm to track subdural hematoma, a dangerous buildup of blood on the surface of the brain.
Viz.ai estimated that its products assist in the care of one patient every 32 seconds. Some of the largest health systems in the U.S. now use its algorithms, including CommonSpirit Health (142 hospitals) and HCA Healthcare (184), which is also an investor. Viz.ai also recently expanded into life sciences with a product that permits researchers to automatically screen patients for clinical trial enrollment.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.