Artificial intelligence startup reaches ‘unicorn’ status with $360M investment
Artificial intelligence startup Fractal has achieved “unicorn” status, scoring a $360 million investment ahead of a forthcoming initial public offering, leaders announced Wednesday.
Headquartered in New York City, the firm bills itself as one of the most prominent players in AI, with a host of business lines serving several industries. Those include Qure.ai, which uses deep learning technology to help radiologists interpret X-rays, CT scans, ultrasounds and MRIs.
Private equity firm TPG is pitching in the funds, with the new financing round valuing Fractal at “well north of $1 billion,” TechCrunch reported.
“The demand for AI is surging across the enterprise. Our AI solutions and products, along with our globally recognized team of experts, empower these organizations to realize and maximize their full potential,” Pranay Agrawal, Fractal’s co-founder and CEO, said Jan. 5. “As we continue to build upon this foundation, the investment from TPG will accelerate our ability to scale and meet this rising demand globally,” he added later.
Beyond radiology, the company also offers solutions to aid senior executives, investors and industrial organizations, among others, in decision making. Fractal Analytics provides products to a host of Fortune 100 firms, TechCrunch noted, with a typical customer generating north of $10 billion in revenue.
Qure.ai was first launched in 2016 and also has offices in India and the United Kingdom. The firm scored its first U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance in June 2020 for a head CT product called qER, used to triage scans with four different clinical concerns. Qure.ai earned its second clearance for a computed tomography AI product in August and recently inked a partnership with Fujifilm to develop further radiology offerings.
Fractal generates more than $100 million in annual revenue and is eyeing an IPO, but leaders are still uncertain when.
“We would like to become a public company sooner than later. How soon? That I won’t be able to share at this point of time. But certainly, we have scale, size, maturity and governance of a public company,” co-founder and group chief executive Srikanth Velamakanni told TechCrunch.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.