Artificial intelligence is a major trend in cancer treatments, focusing primarily on cancer detection as early as possible. That makes a lot of sense given that cancer is not fatal.
However, there is little to ask another basic question. If someone has cancer, do they need aggressive treatments like chemotherapy? That's the problem with Ataraxis, which Ai is trying to solve.
The New York-based startup focuses on using AI to accurately predict what cancer outcomes will look like in 5-10 years, not just when patients have cancer. If there is only a small chance that cancer will return, chemotherapy can be avoided entirely – saving a lot of money while avoiding the infamous side effects of treatment.
Ataraxis AI is currently set to launch its first commercially available tests for breast cancer with US oncologists in the coming months, its co-founder Jan Witowski tells TechCrunch. To bolster launches and expand to other types of cancer, the startup has raised a $20 million Series A.
The round was led by AIX Ventures and was joined by Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Floating Point, Bertelsmann, and the existing investors giant and apparent ventures. Ataraxis emerged from stealth last year with a $4 million seed round.
Ataraxis was co-founded by Witowski and Krzysztof Geras, assistant professors at NYU's medical school focused on AI.
Ataraxis' technology is equipped with an AI model that extracts information from high-resolution images of cancer cells. The model is trained on hundreds of millions of real images from thousands of patients, Witowski said. Recent studies have shown that Ataraxis' technology is 30% more accurate than the current standard care for breast cancer, according to breast cancer.
In the long run, Ataraxis has great ambitions. We hope that by 2030, the tests will affect at least half of new cancer cases. It also sees Meta's chief AI scientist Yann Lecun as a frontier AI company building its own model promoting its AI advisor.
“I think at Ataraxis we're essentially trying to build an AI frontier race, but it's for healthcare applications,” Witowski says. “Many of these problems require very innovative techniques.”
The AI boom has led to a surge in fundraising activities for cancer care startups. Valar Labs raised $22 million in May 2024, for example, to help patients understand their treatment plans. There are also a large number of AI-powered drug discovery companies in the cancer field, such as Manas AI, which raised $24.6 million in January 2025 and co-founded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.