RedBrick AI, a healthtech platform, has raised $4.6 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge with participation from Y Combinator, the company announced on Wednesday.
Operated by RedBrick AI Pvt Ltd, the startup is looking to solve the key challenge to healthcare AI adoption – providing clinicians with high-quality data annotation tools that accelerate the preparation of training datasets.
Founded by Shivam Sharma and Derek Lukacs in 2021, Sharma serves as CEO, while Lukacs is CTO of RedBrick. Both have previously worked on SpaceX’s Hyperloop technology and participated in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. Sharma has a background in aerospace engineering and computer science from University of Michigan, while Lukacs holds a bachelors and masters degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan.
“With the rapid growth of artificial intelligence in clinical settings, researchers need excellent tools to build high-quality datasets and models at scale. Our customers are in the vanguard of this growth, pioneering everything from surgical robots to automated detection of cancers. The new funds will be integral to the growth of our engineering team in India and to expand our suite of products,” said RedBrick AI CEO and co-founder, Shivam Sharma.
In a statement, the company said medical imagery is essential to the source of truth in clinical diagnosis and comprises about 90% of all healthcare data. AI systems can dramatically shorten the time to diagnosis, improve clinician productivity by triaging high-importance cases, and act as the first line of defense in understaffed clinical environments.
RedBrick AI’s tools address several challenges unique to medical data annotation, such as the complexity of existing annotation tools, quality control and machine learning integration. The platform's specialized annotation tools can be accessed through the browser and are designed to be used without prior training. RedBrick AI also offers semi-automated tools to annotate complex 3D medical images.
The use of AI in healthcare stands to transform patient care by boosting clinician productivity and automating clinical diagnosis. In 2021 alone, the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) approved 115 AI algorithms for use in medical environments, an 83% increase from 2018.