In 2017, Vinod Khosla he told CNBC that the radiologist’s job will be obsolete in five years. While the founder of Khosla Ventures later revised this schedule up to 15 yearsclaimed that AI image recognition could soon diagnose disease in scans better than human doctors.
Seven years later, radiologists are still required to interpret most scans (even if AI software is helping them). the most immediate challenge is the lack of these doctors in United States and worldwide.
While Khosla Ventures has backed several imaging startups including; Vista.ai and Q Biothe company’s latest bet is on a company that eases the workload of radiologists by reducing the time spent documenting the report, rather than trying to replace the doctor with a machine.
On Tuesday, Khosla led a $50 million Series B in Rad AI, which has developed a tool that can generate reports for radiologists. Other participants in the round included World Innovation Lab and returning investors ARTIS Ventures, OCV Partners, Kickstart Fund and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused fund). The funding brought the company’s total capital raised to over $80 million.
Rad AI was founded in 2018 by Dr. Jeff Chang, who completed his medical training as a radiologist when he was 16 and later received an MBA from UCLA, and serial entrepreneur Doktor Gurson.
Since Chang knew from his own experience as a practicing physician that most of radiologists’ time is spent documenting findings rather than analyzing images, the pair decided to develop a dedicated LLM trained on radiology report datasets to automate documentation of the doctors’ findings and impressions.
While tech companies didn’t widely use genetic AI until OpenAI’s ChatGPT appeared on the scene in 2022, Rad AI prides itself on being an early adopter of this technology. “I’m pretty sure we’re the first company in radiology to start using LLMs,” Gurson, CEO of Rad AI, told TechCrunch. “We started doing this work in 2018, around the same time that open AI was creating their [first] models.”
Six years later, Rad AI’s products are used by about a third of U.S. health systems and nine of the 10 largest radiology groups in the country, Gurson said.
The new capital will be used to build a team that will develop Rad AI’s latest product: a standalone radiology reporting solution.
“We have a lot of interests, but there’s only so much we can develop at once,” Gurson said, adding that Rad AI is hiring people who can install and maintain the software.
A number of incumbents have been trying to add GenAI functionality to their radiology reporting software over the past 18 months, but Rad AI doesn’t yet consider these companies to be real competitors.
“At this point, probably 99% to 100% of the market is using our products,” he said. “If it’s any indication, we haven’t lost a single customer since we started.”
