In 2017, Vinod Khosla told CNBC that the job of a radiologist “will be obsolete within five years.” The Khosla Ventures founder later revised that timeline to his 15-year length, but argued that AI image recognition would allow scans to diagnose diseases faster than human doctors.
Seven years later, radiologists are still required to interpret most scans (even if AI software helps). An even more immediate challenge is the shortage of such physicians in the United States and around the world.
Khosla Ventures has backed several imaging startups, including Vista.ai and Q Bio, but the company's latest bet is not to replace doctors with machines, but to reduce the time they spend writing reports. The company aims to reduce the workload of radiologists by reducing .
On Tuesday, Khosla made a $50 million Series B investment in Rad AI, which has developed a tool that can generate reports for radiologists. Other participants in the round included World Innovation Lab and re-investors his ARTIS Ventures, OCV Partners, Kickstart Fund, and Gradient Ventures (Google's AI-focused fund). This funding brings the company's total capital raised to over $80 million.
Rad AI was founded in 2018 by Dr. Jeff Chan, who completed his medical training as a radiologist at age 16 and later earned an MBA from UCLA, and serial entrepreneur Dr. Gerson.
Chang knew from his own experience as a practicing physician that the majority of a radiologist's time is spent documenting findings rather than analyzing images, so the two decided to document the physician's findings and impressions. We decided to develop our own LLM trained on the radiology report dataset to automate the .
Generative AI wasn't widely used by tech companies until the arrival of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022, but Rad AI is proud to be an early adopter of this technology. “We believe he is the first company in radiology to start using LLM,” Rad AI CEO Gerson told his TechCrunch. “We started that effort in 2018, right around the time that Open AI [first] model. ”
Six years later, Rad AI's products are used in about one-third of the U.S. health care system and nine of the nation's 10 largest radiology groups, Gerson said.
The new funding will be used to build the team that will deploy Rad AI's latest product, a standalone radiology reporting solution.
“We have a lot of interest, but we can only deploy so much at once,” Gerson said, adding that Rad AI employs people who can install and maintain the software.
Although some incumbent companies have been trying to add GenAI capabilities to their radiology reporting software over the past 18 months, Rad AI does not consider these companies to be true competitors yet.
“Right now, probably 99% to 100% of the market is using our product,” he said. “If that's any indication, we haven't lost a single customer since our inception.”