Techbio company Qureight has announced the close of their significantly oversubscribed €8 million Series A round. Hargreave Hale AIM VCT led the round, joined by XTX Ventures, Guinness Ventures, and existing investors including Playfair Capital, Meltwind, Ascension Life Fund and Cambridge Angels. The funds will be used to accelerate their AI-driven product portfolio and expand into new diseases including lung cancer.
Qureight is initially targeting a $6.8 billion, rapidly-growing addressable market for clinical trial imaging analysis and data curation in lung and heart disease. By unlocking the power of clinical and imaging data to advance the understanding of complex disease progression, their technology is playing a pivotal role in efforts to improve outcomes for patients and extend their lives.
Dr. Muhunthan Thillai, founder and CEO of Qureight, said: “The close of our Series A round marks the ‘end of the beginning’ and the start of a new chapter for Qureight, as we turn our focus to developing our platform and creating products in new disease areas. Our mission to extend the lives of lung and heart disease patients will be bolstered by the invaluable expertise of our new board and new senior team members, and we are looking forward to adding to our strategic biopharma collaborations.”
Complex lung and heart diseases, such as Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and Pulmonary Hypertension, currently have limited treatment options and poor survival rates. Typically, high-value data from patient scans and records is stored across numerous platforms and databases in an unstructured form. Researchers must manually extract relevant data from source for their research, a hugely expensive and time-consuming process.
Built to tackle this complex problem, Qureight’s digital infrastructure houses and curates multiple types of medical data for powerful analysis.
Lucy Bloomfield, co-manager of the Hargreave Hale AIM VCT, commented: “Hargreave Hale AIM VCT has a long tradition of investing in innovative, high growth companies, and the application of AI in life sciences is a particular area of interest. Through the investment process, the team at Qureight has impressed us with their vision and expertise. We are delighted to be the lead investor on this funding round and look forward to supporting Qureight as the company expands its capability.”
Gabriele Papievyte, Head of Ventures at XTX Markets, added: “We are delighted to be supporting Qureight and the management team through this Series A investment. We believe their AI-driven platform will significantly improve outcomes from clinical trials and aid the development of new treatments for complex lung and heart diseases.”
Qureight has unique healthcare access through data contracts across NHS England and can collect CT scans, biomarkers and other trial endpoints directly from hospitals or clinical research organisations (CROs) in real time as a complex disease drug trial progresses. This information is securely collated and structured, ready for analysis.
The insights from this analysis can be used to look for drug responses and find new endpoints. The structured data can also be used to build virtual trial patients, making it easier to run AI models and compare disparate data sets. Ultimately, this allows for the design of more resource-efficient clinical trials, to improve existing disease treatments, and to develop powerful new drugs.
Dr Malcolm King, Chief Investment Officer at Guinness Ventures, said: “Use of AI to accelerate drug discovery is one of the hottest opportunities in VC right now. We have been impressed by Qureight’s potential to help its customers accelerate discovery of new treatments for complex lung and heart disease and are looking forward to working with Muhunthan and his team to help them realise the next stage of their growth ambitions.”
Chris Smith, Managing Partner at Playfair Capital said: “We’re very happy to continue supporting Muhunthan and the team in this round. The pull from the market has been increasing in intensity over the past year and this funding will allow them to capitalise on the opportunities ahead. With the Qureight platform delivering never before available insights, the impact is far reaching – pharma companies generate millions of dollars from better decision making and patients benefit from more efficacious therapies sooner.”
