Veterinary Precision Medicine Company ImpriMed Raises $8 Million

By Annie Baker • Apr 19, 2021
  • ImpriMed — a leading veterinary precision medicine startup — announced recently that it has closed a total of $8 million in Pre-Series A funding. These are the details.

ImpriMed — a leading veterinary precision medicine startup — announced recently that it has closed a total of $8 million in Pre-Series A funding with $7.7 million from VCs and the rest as government grant. This round of funding was led by HG Initiative and other participants include Draper Associates, Draper Dragon, BonAngels, Murex Partners, Translink Investment, Primer Sazze, FuturePlay, and ES Investor.

What does ImpriMed do? ImpriMed utilizes AI to predict which anti-cancer drugs are most likely to be effective for a particular dog’s lymphoma or leukemia using live data generated from chemosensitivity and immunophenotyping assays on a patient’s fresh cancer cells. And its innovative approach to pet cancer care enables veterinary oncologists to make chemotherapy decisions with confidence, knowing quantified drug response predictions prior to actual drug administration.

With this round of funding, ImpriMed plans to develop additional prediction models for their current target patients in canine blood cancers, scale up their customer network, and expand pipelines to other types of cancers in dogs and cats.

ImpriMed has been able to clinically validate its patented technology with a peer-reviewed journal publication in Veterinary and Comparative Oncology that demonstrated an accurate prediction of tumor size reduction and a faster time to remission when using the ImpriMed Chemo Response Prediction service. And so far, more than 2,000 services have been provided to community treated canine patients.

KEY QUOTES:

“ImpriMed is breaking new ground in medicine. Using artificial intelligence to test drugs in pets can lead to solving many diseases in pets and the company could be an onramp for breakthroughs with humans. Enormous opportunity.” 

— Tim Draper, Founding Partner at Draper Associates

“HG Initiative along with other investors, is a welcome endorsement for ImpriMed’s AI-Driven Personalized Chemo Response Prediction tool and its viability. We look forward to all the benefits and access this funding will provide to support oncologists and pet parents to improve therapeutic options for their pets and will allow us to develop more finely tuned AI models to increase the accuracy of our service reports.” 

— Dr. Sungwon Lim, CEO and Co-Founder at ImpriMed