Israeli digital blood test company Scopio Labs today announced the completion of a $50 million Series C financing round from investors including OurCrowd, Aurum Ventures, Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank Invest and Ilex Medical. This brings to $84 million the total amount raised by the company.
The Tel Aviv-based digital cell morphology solutions company will use the funds to double its workforce, with an emphasis on technology, sales and strategic partnerships and further develop its end-to-end hardware and software platform for digitizing, quantifying and analyzing hematology and other digital cytology samples. Scopio has already developed ultra-high quality and FDA-cleared imaging and AI analysis platforms enhance diagnostic capabilities and enable remote work. Its FDA-cleared, CE-marked full-field peripheral blood smear application and its ScopioVet veterinary application are already in full commercial use across the US and Europe.
Scopio said that common blood tests like the peripheral blood smear review, is still predominantly conducted by a human looking at a sample under a microscope, classifying cells by type, counting them and hunting abnormalities that could mean cancer or other diseases. Even when snapshots of a few cells can be digitized, the images are removed from its full context, forcing investigators to keep the slide and microscope on hand.
Founded in 2015 by CEO Itai Hayut and Erez Na’aman, Scopio is in use in leading medical centers and laboratories around the world. Scopio has 85 employees in its Israeli, US, and UK offices.
Hayut said, "Deep Learning can analyze hundreds of times more healthcare data from a patient, supporting physician decisions and detecting conditions like cancers, anemias, and bleeding disorders, as well as infections and allergies. But for us it all begins with high-quality digital imaging data."
Scopio has created a full end-to-end workflow to digitize and analyze blood samples. Scopio’s custom-designed "X100" digital slide-scanning device uses computational photography to produce ultra-high-resolution images of entire sample slides. Once scanned, Scopio images can be accessed anywhere.
Hayut added, "In the 21st century, people shouldn’t be looking through microscopes, manually counting cells. Scopio’s full-field imaging and AI platform means tens of thousands of cells in a single sample can be examined, counted and analyzed instantly and reviewed by a specialist regardless of location, leading to faster, easier and earlier detection and diagnosis of cancers and many other life-threatening medical conditions."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on February 9, 2022.
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