Our Investment in Centaur Labs
By Dr. Derick En’Wezoh, Investor at Susa Ventures
Susa Ventures is excited to announce our investment in Centaur Labs, a Boston-based startup accelerating AI development in healthcare by providing customizable medical data labeling through the collective intelligence of a scaled network of medical experts.
Today, Centaur is announcing their $15 million Series A round. This investment is particularly special to Susa as it represents one of our first investments coming out of our recently announced Susa Ventures IV, a $125 million fund focused on early-stage investments. Susa Ventures participated alongside Matrix Partners, an early-stage investment firm based in Boston and San Francisco that led the round. We are thrilled to welcome Erik Duhaime, Zach Rausnitz, Tom Gellatly, and the rest of the team at Centaur to the Susa Family.
Susa has been investing at the intersection of artificial intelligence and healthcare since our inception. Having invested in medical artificial intelligence companies like Viz.ai and HealthTensor, we deeply believe in the power of deep learning to substantially improve healthcare outcomes at lower costs.
In the last 5 years, there has been a staggering increase in the number of AI companies in healthcare receiving venture funding. These companies are creating AI-powered algorithms that promise to detect disease on radiographic imaging, accelerate the pace of drug development, and automatically interpret medical tests. However, these algorithms are only as accurate as the underlying data labels used to train them.
Today, it can take a herculean amount of time, capital, and effort to generate accurate and meticulously labeled datasets to train cutting-edge deep learning algorithms satisfactorily. Centaur solves this palpable problem.
Centaur was founded by Erik Duhaime, CEO, while completing his Ph.D. at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. Founding alongside Erik was his long-time friend from Brown University, Zach Rausnitz, CTO, and Tom Gellatly, VP of Engineering, who managed the data labeling team at the self-driving car company Cruise Automation.
Earlier this year, Erik pitched us on the vision of leveraging collective intelligence and a scaled network of healthcare experts to create annotated medical datasets with an unprecedented level of accuracy and speed. We at Susa saw the potential and were immediately hooked. There is a gold rush occurring in the development of AI algorithms in healthcare, and Centaur’s accurate labels and annotations are the picks and shovels.
Centaur harnesses the power of collective intelligence through their cultivated network of tens of thousands of medical experts from over 140 countries. This network annotates medical images, text, and audio on Centaur’s gamified iOS app, DiagnosUs, where labelers improve their skills and compete with one another. The most accurate labelers receive cash prizes. Notably, Centaur collects multiple opinions on every case — with more opinions collected on the most challenging cases — and intelligently combines those opinions into more accurate labels than those from an individual expert. Each week, the platform receives more than 1 million opinions.
The healthcare industry is generating approximately 30% of the world’s data volume. In large part, it is unstructured and poorly labeled but, if organized, could drastically accelerate the development of AI. We’re thrilled to partner with the team at Centaur as they unlock the value of medical data.
