- Molten Ventures led a $20 million Series B investment in Qureight, an AI imaging platform for lung and heart clinical trials.
- This round brings Qureight’s funding from a £1.5 million seed in 2022 up to $20 million. The new funds will support launching an AI imaging lab and expanding into asthma, pulmonary hypertension, and bronchiectasis.
- Co-founder and CEO Dr Muhunthan Thillai continues to work as a consultant chest physician at Royal Papworth Hospital. He thought of Qureight after encountering a case where he could not confidently interpret a CT scan.
Qureight, a Cambridge company building AI imaging tools for lung and heart clinical trials, has closed a $20 million Series B round led by Molten Ventures. Previous investors Hargreave Hale AIM VCT, XTX Ventures, Guinness Ventures, Meltwind, and Ascension also joined.
Dr Muhunthan Thillai co-founded Qureight in 2018 with Dr Alessandro Ruggiero after noticing that pharmaceutical companies often struggled to use imaging data effectively, which led to delays in clinical trials.
“There was an area to go and help these pharma companies do better clinical trials, and so that’s how the company started,” Thillai tells Tech Funding News. Earlier, it raised £1.5 million in seed funding in 2022.
The global market for lung and heart clinical trials is projected to reach $27.5 billion by 2030, with a 6.9% annual growth rate. The new funding will help Qureight build an in-house AI imaging lab and expand into asthma, lung cancer, pulmonary hypertension, bronchiectasis and drug-induced lung toxicity.
From first talks in a pub to a technology concept
Neither founder has an engineering background, which Thillai says was a major challenge. He continues to see patients part-time in Cambridge hospitals while leading the company.
“It’s very difficult to be a founder and grow a company and still see patients, but I love seeing patients,” Thillai says.
Qureight solved this by building a senior technical team, including a chief technology officer who was global head of platform at Hewlett Packard, a chief medical officer who led research at CMR Surgical, and a chief scientific officer who was a professor of machine learning at Imperial College London.
Founded in 2018, Qureight provides two integrated products for pharmaceutical companies running clinical trials. The first, Workflow, speeds up imaging decisions, cutting turnaround time from about two weeks to 48 hours. The second, AI Lung, builds detailed models of airways and blood vessels in lung and heart scans, helping companies assess how drugs affect disease progression.
The new imaging lab is built around a general-purpose foundation model of the chest. Thillai says this lets Qureight develop disease-specific deep learning models in just one or two months, instead of about a year if starting from scratch.
Qureight is already running global clinical trials with AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, and several biotech partners, according to Thillai.
When it comes to direct rivals, Oxford-based Brainomix is the closest European comparison. Its FDA-cleared e-Lung platform is used in pulmonary fibrosis and was recently chosen by Boehringer Ingelheim as a co-primary endpoint in a Phase 3 trial. Brainomix raised a £18.8 million Series C extension in February, bringing its total funding to over £49 million.
While Brainomix offers diagnostic software for hospitals, Qureight is involved earlier in the clinical trial process, focusing on trial design and imaging contract research.
The investors and what’s next
Qureight first approached Molten Ventures for funding two years ago but was turned down. This time, three lead investors submitted term sheets within six weeks, and Qureight could have raised much more.
The company chose Molten Ventures, valuing their relationship and wanting to keep the round anchored to a London-based fund, even though US investors also made offers.
Molten’s healthtech portfolio includes Deciphex, an AI-powered digital pathology company also backed by Deakin, along with CoachHub, which closed a $200 million round with Molten’s backing. It is one of Europe’s most active deep tech investors, giving Qureight a lead investor with experience scaling companies beyond Series B.
Dr Inga Deakin, a partner at Molten Ventures who is joining Qureight’s board as part of the round, says: “Qureight demonstrates how AI, powered by real-world data, can accelerate discovery and transform clinical research. The team’s rapid deployment of solutions in areas of unmet need underscores their unique capability to drive the next generation of medical innovation. We look forward to working with Muhunthan and the team as they deliver on this vision.”
Qureight plans to double its staff to 100 by December and open a second London office next month. The company also aims to expand into asthma, lung cancer, and pulmonary hypertension trials before the end of the year.
Whether Qureight becomes the standard for pharmaceutical trials or stays as a specialist provider will depend on upcoming partnership announcements.
