Ataraxis AI, a leading AI precision medicine company, announced its $20.4 million Series A financing led by AIX Ventures with participation from Floating Point, Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Bertelsmann Investments, and existing investors Giant Ventures and Obvious Ventures. The funding round also received backing from angel investors and healthcare pioneers, including Mario Schlosser (co-founder and former CEO of Oscar Health) and Ryan Fukushima (COO of Tempus), and others. And leading researchers from OpenAI and DeepMind also participated.
Launched by Jan Witowski, MD, PhD, and Krzysztof Geras, PhD, Ataraxis AI is reshaping cancer diagnostics with a frontier AI foundation model called Kestrel. The funding comes as the company’s first offering, Ataraxis Breast—the world’s first AI-native prognostic/predictive platform for breast cancer—was clinically validated in a landmark study to be 30% more accurate than the current standard of care for breast cancer.
Plus, Ataraxis AI is on track to launch Ataraxis Breast for clinical use later this year for oncologists across the United States. This new funding will also support the continuing development of offerings by expanding treatment selection capabilities within and beyond breast cancer and the development of next-generation AI foundation models.
Through novel optimization strategies and methodological sophistication, Kestrel also beats existing state-of-the-art models with less required data and computational power. And the model outperforms existing approaches by uncovering complex, previously undetectable patterns linked to patient outcomes across all disease types. Kestrel is the first of Ataraxis’ foundation models, which will power the development of treatment selection tools for all cancer types.
Ataraxis AI also revealed its Clinical Advisory Board, which features an impressive roster of medical oncology key opinion leaders from top health systems, including: Dr. Francisco Esteva (Chief of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Northwell Lenox Hill), Dr. Lajos Pusztai (Co-Leader Genetics, Genomics and Epigenetics Program at Yale Cancer Center), Dr. Adam Brufsky (Co-Director of the Cancer Therapeutics Program at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center), and Dr. Freya Schnabel (Director of Breast Surgery, NYU). And these additions also join Yann LeCun, PhD, Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Turing Award Laureate, who serves as the company’s AI advisor.
KEY QUOTES:
“This investment is a testament to the groundbreaking work our team is accomplishing and the immense potential of AI in precision medicine. It also reflects our progress, securing funding just a few months after receiving clinical validation. With this capital, we are on track to further accelerate our mission to change how cancer is treated and ultimately impact at least 50 percent of new cancer cases by 2030.”
- Jan Witowski, MD, PhD, co-founder and CEO, Ataraxis AI
“In the next five years, the world’s leading oncology centers won’t just have top physicians—they’ll have AI copilots revolutionizing diagnosis and treatment. Ataraxis AI is at the forefront of this transformation, and its breakthrough platform, Kestrel, is setting a new standard for precision oncology. Jan and his team aren’t just building another AI tool—they’re redefining how cancer is detected and treated, with the potential to improve millions of lives. We couldn’t be more excited to back them on this journey.”
- Krish Ramadurai, Partner at AIX Ventures
