Larry Ellison leads $23M Series B in Imagene AI to build ‘OpenAI for precision medicine’
Israeli startup’s AI platform analyzes biopsies and patient data to match treatments faster.
Imagene AI, which develops multi‑modal foundation models for precision medicine, has raised $23 million in a Series B round led by Oracle founder Larry Ellison. The new capital injection brings the company’s total funding to $45 million, with existing investor Aguras Pathology Investments also participating in the round.
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Founded in 2020 by Dean Bitan, Jonathan Zalach, and Shahar Porat, Imagene AI employs 30 people, most of whom are based in Israel, with the remainder in the United States.
“We plan to expand our offering to more locations and to grow our activities in the pharmaceutical world, because we want to see more patients receiving personalized treatments, and we aim to help companies develop better drugs,” Dean Bitan, the company’s CEO, told Calcalist.
“This is Larry Ellison’s second investment in the company. He’s a very special person and we share a vision for what we want to achieve. For him, this is not just another investment, he’s very involved, even to the level of personally looking for technological solutions to problems related to integrating different disciplines.”
Bitan explains that the “brain” Imagene AI has built is already embedded within several pharmaceutical companies, helping optimize clinical trials and make personalized medicine truly personal.
“One of the first products we brought to market is a system that analyzes biopsy images to identify cancer mutations, ensuring patients receive the most effective treatment,” Bitan said. “We’ve announced a collaboration with Tempus, the largest testing provider in the U.S., which will distribute our test and work with hospitals in Israel.”
At the core of Imagene AI’s platform is a system that performs real-time analysis and learns from a wide range of clinical and biological sources. Biopsy images, genomic profiles, and clinical data are processed by advanced AI models, large language models, and proprietary biological analysis engines developed by the company.
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“Our system is like what OpenAI did for language models, but in our world of medicine and biology, where information is far less accessible,” Bitan said. “We’ve collected extensive clinical and medical data and fed it into our ‘brain,’ which can be asked all kinds of questions.
“For example, the model can predict when a disease might return. It’s a living system that constantly learns from new information and grows in capability. We can help make every clinical trial faster and every treatment more successful.
“Our foundation is to build a core model that ingests diverse data and provides an infrastructure for pharma companies to run better, more successful experiments.”
“Imagene AI’s ability to unite imaging, omics, and clinical data in a single foundation model is exactly the kind of breakthrough we believe will drive the next generation of drugs and diagnostics,” said Larry Ellison, Oracle Chairman and CTO. “Their approach opens the door to a more adaptive, biologically fluent era of precision medicine.”
The company is expanding its strategic partnerships to make AI-based tests widely available. This includes its collaboration with Tempus to distribute its lung cancer detection test across the U.S., and the use of this test at leading medical centers in Israel, including Ichilov and Sheba Tel Hashomer. These tests help doctors make critical therapeutic and diagnostic decisions within minutes, based on an in-depth analysis of biopsy images alone.
