Medical Knowledge A.I. Company Raises Early $4.8M

(Gerd Altmann, Pixabay)

20 Nov. 2019. A company developing a system with artificial intelligence to analyze medical literature for treatment insights is raising nearly $5 million in its first venture round. Funding for the company Causaly, based in London, is led by PenTech Ventures in Edinburgh, Scotland that supports early stage technology enterprises.

Causaly analyzes published medical research, conducting a full-text search of nearly 25 million published articles and abstracts with, as the company notes, some 100,000 new articles added each month. The company’s technology searches databases including PubMed Central and Medline, as well as third-party databases, with analysis for revealing causal relationships in the literature. The technology then combines natural language processing with machine learning algorithms to learn the context of the documents and linguistic expressions, for constructing chains of causality. Results are displayed as lists and visual flow charts.

Causaly says the searched literature includes both basic and applied research covering subjects such as living organisms, chemicals and drugs, physiology, disorders, and genes and molecular sequences. The company says its services are used for faster and more transparent decision making on drug discovery, drug safety, clinical trials, epidemiology, health economics, market access, and intellectual property questions. Causaly partners with a number of drug makers and biotechnology companies, as well as hospitals, academic institutions, and scientific publishers.

“At Causaly,” says co-founder and CEO Yiannis Kiachopoulos in a company blog post, “our aim is to help researchers, doctors and decision-makers from industry and academia find the pivotal insights that are currently hidden in millions of biomedical documents. We believe that Causaly can transform how people find, visualize and interpret knowledge, and contribute to solving the most difficult and systemic problems in biomedicine and human health.”

The two year-old company’s first venture funding round is raising $4.8 million led by PenTech Ventures. Other new and current investors include EBRD Venture Capital, Marathon Venture Capital, and other undisclosed angel investors. PenTech Ventures invests in early-stage software companies in the U.K.

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