Firm building machine learning for healthcare raises $8.5m

KenSci, a company that is developing a machine learning platform for healthcare, has raised $8.5 million in a series A funding led by Ignition Partners with participation from Osage University Partners and Mindset Ventures.

The funding will accelerate innovation for KenSci’s machine learning platform and expand operations to support the company’s rapidly growing customer base.

KenSci’s healthcare data platform and machine learning-powered applications are built collaboratively with practicing physicians, data scientists, machine learning developers and computing and biomedical researchers.

Incubated at the University of Washington (UW) Tacoma, KenSci was spun out in 2015 after more than four years of research and industry-academic collaboration. KenSci leverages Microsoft’s Azure and Cortana suite to power secure, cloud-scale machine learning, and was previously part of Microsoft Accelerators’ Data Science program.

“We invested in KenSci based on the fact that the problems KenSci addresses are increasingly central to value-based care. KenSci has successfully integrated advanced machine learning with complex healthcare workflows to deliver tangible ROI for some of the biggest health systems within 90 days,” said John Connors, managing partner at Ignition Partners.

“Because of this, KenSci’s risk prediction platform has already improved outcomes for thousands of lives and helped providers save millions of dollars, and this is only the beginning.”