Jiva.ai Raises £1.3M for Prostate Diagnostics and AI Platform Expansion

• £1.3M seed financing raised from VC, state-aid backed entity and angel investors.

• The capital will be used to grow the team and productionise the existing prostate cancer work as well as build a general purpose multimodal AI platform.

• The platform will be additionally applied to other healthcare use cases such as patient waiting list optimisation.

• The company will be moving headquarters to Cardiff.

• Solidification of strategic and technical partnerships that will cement Jiva’s position in the marketplace.

27th May 2021, Cardiff, UK

Jiva.ai – a machine learning platform for data-driven health – announces it has closed a £1.3M seed funding round to support its ongoing work in prostate diagnostics and multimodal AI systems in healthcare. The round was significantly oversubscribed.

This round has attracted support from Development Bank of Wales (DBW), Consilience Ventures and members of The Wealth Club. Significantly, the support of DBW means that Jiva will be headquartered in Cardiff where the team is already engaged in creating a development team composed of backend and data science developers. Additionally, the Welsh connection has opened up some significant market opportunities that the team will explore in coming months.

In Consilience Ventures – a VC that takes a very different approach to funding and service support as an integral part of its business model – Jiva finds a long-term partner for growth with a network and knowledge base that aid the company at every stage of development. The Wealth Club – an extensive network of sophisticated and high net-worth investors – also lends its significant support in this round.

To date Jiva has raised a mixture of equity and grant funding of approximately £400K.

Jiva is led and co-founded by Dr Manish Patel (CEO), Dr Chetan Kaher (CCO) and Sarah D’Souza (COO). The company has attracted talent across the spectrum, from technology and data science (Dr Richard Hammersley, CTO) to market access (Dr Samir Khan) and strategic development (Dr Andrew Thompson). Jiva has also secured an incredibly strong board that has facilitated its growth trajectory in the past year under the leadership and direction of Kevin McDonnell (Chairman), Paul Gaudin, Oliver Wylie, John Zafar and Chris Tossell. 

Jiva aspires to be the world’s first dedicated multimodal AI platform, enabling the fusion of models across modalities to create better diagnostics and automation within healthcare and further applications beyond. Firstly with respect to prostate cancer diagnostics – a disease that claims thousands of lives in the UK every year and approx. 50K new diagnoses – Jiva will be implementing a new AI-led aid for radiologists to identify clinically relevant tumours from MRI scans. More broadly, the platform will be tested and applied across a wide range of applications, from diagnostics to automation, enriching the healthcare technology ecosystem with a truly multimodal approach to artificial intelligence.

Following the investment Jiva welcomes Philip Barnes (DBW) and Dr Deepak Kotak (Consilience Ventures) to the board as investor representatives. 

Commenting on the round, Dr Manish Patel (CEO) said:

We are immensely excited to welcome on board our new investors and greatly appreciate their support in planting the seed of our vision. AI and automation could not come at a more requisite time where the aftermath of COVID will prove to be a testing time for every healthcare system in the world. We want to empower healthcare professionals, researchers, academics, government, SMEs and corporations with the ability to rapidly prototype AI products and put them on the road to production and I have no doubt that Jiva will be at the forefront of that effort.

Kevin McDonnell (Chairman) adds:

We are delighted to have closed this funding round, which will allow the business to continue product development and commercialisation. AI represents an enormous opportunity, and Jiva.ai is well placed to support healthcare professionals around the world, in shaping the future of healthcare.