Sirona Medical gets $40M for cloud-native radiology IT platform

Sirona Medical, a developer of a cloud-native platform for radiology IT software, raised $40 million in series B funding, the company announced Tuesday.

Sirona’s platform, called Workspace, joins the core components of existing radiology IT software in a single workspace to streamline workflows for radiologists.

The San Francisco-based company, which emerged out of stealth last year, has raised $62.5 million to date.

Radiology software, from imaging databases to practice management solutions, can cause frustrations for physicians as the many tools that radiologists use on a daily basis aren’t fully integrated, said Cameron Andrews, CEO and founder of Sirona.

“All of those systems are fragmented, built-in silos because they were hard to do individually when they were built,” he said. “But in a cloud-based paradigm, with the tools that we have now, none of those things is overwhelmingly difficult, and by unifying them all together, the tools exist now to make the workflow as a whole better in a way that wasn’t possible even a few years ago.”

Andrews, a 25-year-old Stanford graduate, grew up seeing those silos in radiology through his grandfather, a private practice radiologist and founder of the Center for Diagnostic Imaging, now known as Rayus Radiology.

Since receiving his undergraduate degree in biomedical computation and pursuing a master’s degree in biomedical informatics, he’s been working to develop a solution. He said the company had been building Sirona’s platform in stealth for three years before the business took off.

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“Until February of this year, we didn’t have any businesspeople. We were all engineers and physicians,” Andrews said.

Andrews said artificial intelligence hasn’t been properly leveraged in radiology up to this point, and Sirona’s technology enables radiologists to use AI seamlessly in their platform, adding value to the radiologist rather than competing with them.

AI will be “the engine to the workflow of the future for radiology,” he said—but noted that it won’t be the solution.

“If you want to create value with AI, you need to create value through the physician,” he said.

The funds from the series B round will be used to continue to refine the platform—“close to 70%” will be spent on product development," Andrews said—as well as to onboard physicians and grow their partnerships.

Sirona previously announced partnerships with five of the U.S.’s leading radiology practices, which make up about 2% of all radiology reads in the country. The company plans to partner with “a handful” of additional private practice radiology groups in the coming months, Andrews said.

“We are taking it somewhat slowly by design,” said Michael Chang, Sirona’s head of marketing. “We want to make sure that our initial adopters are very happy, that they want to use it live in clinical production on a day-to-day basis, and those are going to be the people that are our strongest advocates.”

GreatPoint Ventures led the series B round, joined by Rose Park Advisors and Avidity Partners as well as all previous investors including 8VC and Global Founders Capital.