GERMANY – Vara, a Berlin, Germany-based provider of an AI breast cancer screening platform, raised €4.5m in extension funding.
The round, which takes the total Series A funding raised to €11m, was led by VI Partners with participation from EQT Foundation, Med 360, AI Venture Studio, Merantix, as well as Think Health. The company intends to use the funds to complete its wide-scale clinical study* of AI and workflow software in breast cancer screening, with an expected recruitment of 400,000 screening-age women. Led by Jonas Muff, Vara provides an intelligent platform that infuses artificial intelligence into routine breast screenings. By mitigating much of the human subjectivity associated with reading mammography results, and reducing the repetitive work radiologists are routinely subjected to, the company aims to make breast screenings effective, personal, and accessible. More than 80,000 mammography examinations per month are assessed through Vara, and 30% of all screening centres in Germany work with Vara. Through this integration, the system has access to more than 10 years of clinical and pathological follow-up data from 9 million+ mammograms. Vara now powers five screening centres across Mexico in partnership with Mamotest, a breast cancer screening provider with an innovative high quality diagnosis and patient support digital solution. Vara has also partnered with MITERA, the largest Private Hospital in Greece. Large employers, such as the automobile company JAC or Latin American food company GAT are purchasing screenings offered by Mamotest and Vara, as are large NGO organisations such as ProMujer. * Vara’s PRAIM (PRospective multicenter observational study of an integrated artificial intelligence (AI) system with live Monitoring) study, which is due to run until mid-2023, is led by Prof. Dr. Alexander Katalinic, Director of Social Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Lübeck and scientific advisor to the German Mammography Screening Program. When completed, the results of this study will be a part of Vara’s growing clinical evidence base, published in the likes of the Lancet Digital Health and the European Journal of Radiology.25/10/2022
