• Vara

  Led · Equity · Oct 2024

  Vara develops an AI-powered software platform to enhance accuracy and efficiency in breast cancer detection via mammography. Its software is integrated into Germany's National Breast Cancer Screening Program and supports 40% of the country's screening centres, assessing over 100,000 images and benefiting over 80,000 women monthly. The company reports significantly increased cancer detection rates—including finding 50% of cancers radiologists would have missed—reduced false positives, and improved radiologist workflow efficiency. Vara published a study in The Lancet Digital Health using nearly two million datasets from the UK, Sweden, and Germany showing improvements in detection, recall rates, and workload reduction. The company is expanding into emerging healthcare markets, notably India where it began a 2023 partnership with NM Medical in Mumbai, Bangalore, and Pune. Financially, Vara announced an $8.9M fundraising to accelerate its global expansion efforts. Vara provides an AI-driven breast cancer screening platform that integrates with routine mammography to reduce reader subjectivity and repetitive work for radiologists. Led by Jonas Muff, the company assesses more than 80,000 mammography examinations per month and works with about 30% of screening centres in Germany, with access to over 10 years of clinical and pathological follow-up data from more than 9 million mammograms. Vara powers five screening centres in Mexico through a partnership with Mamotest and has partnered with MITERA in Greece; large employers and NGOs are buying screenings via these partnerships. The company intends to use the new funds to complete its wide-scale PRAIM clinical and workflow study, which aims to recruit 400,000 screening-age women and is due to run until mid-2023. Results from the PRAIM study will contribute to Vara's growing clinical evidence base, with publications planned in journals including Lancet Digital Health and the European Journal of Radiology. Financially, Vara raised a €4.5m Series A extension, bringing total Series A proceeds to €11m. Vara builds machine-learning software that helps radiologists detect cancer by filtering out healthy mammograms so clinicians can focus on ambiguous and urgent cases. Its platform functions as an end-to-end workflow and reporting system usable across multiple workstations. The company says its approach addresses screening inefficiency—97% of mammograms are healthy—and reduces repetitive assembly-line work for radiologists. Vara has partnered with radiology groups and teleradiology providers to deploy screening programs across Germany, Spain, Poland, Austria and Switzerland, and is in advanced discussions in the United Kingdom. The team of 25 medical specialists, engineers and entrepreneurs was initially backed by the Merantix venture studio and was originally named Merantix Healthcare. The company plans to use the new funding to expand further in Europe and to leverage vast data pools to improve financial and clinical outcomes.

No current team members are available.