The health tech startup RedBrick AI intends to grow the market for its medical images annotations service, thus it recently completed a funding round in which it raised $4.6 million. The round was headed by Sequoia India and Surge, which operates in Southeast Asia.
Artificial intelligence has become pervasive in clinical diagnostics. However, researchers need to spend a significant portion of their early effort preparing data for training artificial intelligence systems. In addition, the process of training necessitates the annotation of thousands of clinical photographs over the course of hundreds of physicians’ working hours. The software as a service (SaaS) startup with its headquarters in Delaware and an Indian subsidiary located in Pune is addressing this issue by developing automated and semi-automatic annotation tools.
According to Shivam Sharma, co-founder and CEO of RedBrick AI, the company helps produce annotations up to sixty percent more quickly utilising their configurable workflow system that works with medical images such as CT scans, X-rays, MRIs, and ultrasound.
“We see ourselves as establishing the foundational layer of artificial intelligence in healthcare,” the company said. “In the future, we aim to support teams with everything from the data preparation to the FDA clearance of the algorithms,” Sharma said in an interview with TechCrunch. “[T]here are a lot of moving parts.”
RedBrick AI was established in 2021 by Sharma and Derek Lukacs, both of whom had previously worked as engineers on SpaceX’s Hyperloop project. The company provides customers with specialised annotation tools that can be accessed through a web browser and integrated into their existing data storage systems, such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure. In addition to that, it provides semi-automated tools for annotating intricate 3D medical images.
In addition, RedBrick AI offers application programming interfaces (APIs) that machine learning developers can use to combine their cloud solutions with clinical data storage, like enterprise PACS servers used in hospitals.
According to Sharma, “clinicians simply need to connect into their browser, and the workflow part of it is entirely automated.”
Once it has been properly annotated, imaging can be used for diagnosis that is both faster and more detailed. In addition, surgical robots and automated cancer detection systems can make use of the annotated imagery.
Although the majority of RedBrick AI’s seven-person team is located in India, the company primarily concentrates its efforts on marketing its products in the United States of America and Europe. In addition, the startup estimates that open-source tools account for 99% of the competition, which is followed by tools built in-house by businesses to fulfil the criteria that are unique to them.
Early clients of RedBrick AI include the biotech startup Orbem from Germany, the cancer and disease screening platform Prenuvo from Canada, the non-profit hospital and physician network Mass General Brigham from Boston, and the radiology AI platform Deeptek from Maharashtra.
Y Combinator and angel investors were also a part of the all-equity seed round that the company participated in. Prior to this round, the startup was recognised as a member of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort, which was mostly comprised of 32 Indian startups.
Sharma stated that RedBrick AI intends to use the investment to expand its customer base to include enterprises in addition to its current customers. In addition to this, it intends to recruit other engineers so that it may increase its collection of specialist tools.
