Imagia Cybernetics Inc., a company backed by BDC Capital and Fidelity Investments Canada, has officially announced the acquisition of venture backed Cadens Medical Imaging, a technology leader in medical imaging software.
The acquisition closed on December 13, 2016 and was funded through proceeds from Imagia’s Series A financing in December 2016 led by BDC Capital and joined by Fidelity Investments Canada ULC.
Imagia Cybernetics is a healthcare artificial intelligence (AI) company developing radiomics biomarkers and clinical decision support systems.
Cadens was backed by Desjardins-Innovatech, Fonds de solidarité FTQ Investissements technologiques (FSIT), Anges Québec, FIER Montestrie Capital, FIER Croissance Durable, FIER Innovation Durable and FIER Succès.
Founded in 2007, Cadens has developed and marketed FDA and CE cleared innovative medical imaging software products for cancer care. An ISO 13485 company, Cadens has extensive experience in delivering patient benefits through AI-based software products. Cadens created and validated unique foundational technologies and intellectual property intended to enable Imagia to foster new collaborative biomarker discovery processes that will scale across multiple healthcare institutions.
“This strategic transaction will significantly accelerate Imagia’s mission of delivering AI-driven accessible personalized healthcare solutions,” said Frédéric Francis, CEO of Imagia. “Augmenting Imagia’s deep learning expertise with Cadens’ capabilities in clinical AI and imaging was extremely compelling to ensure our path from validation to commercialization. This is particularly true for our initial focus on developing oncology biomarkers that can improve cancer care by predicting a patient’s disease progression and treatment response.”
“Our combined team will build upon the long-term outlook of clinical research together with healthcare partnerships, and the energy and focus of a technology startup with privileged access to deep learning expertise and academic research from Yoshua Bengio’s MILA lab. We are now uniquely positioned to deliver AI-driven solutions across the healthcare ecosystem,” said Florent Chandelier, Cadens’ co-founder and Imagia CTO.
“Imaging evolved considerably in the past decade in terms of sequence acquisition as well as image quality and we believe AI enables the creation of next generation diagnostics that will also allow personalization of care,” said Jean-Francois Pariseau, Chairman of the Board of Imagia and Partner at the BDC Healthcare Venture Fund. “The acquisition of Cadens is an important step in building the Imagia platform and supports our strategy of investing in ground breaking companies with the potential to become world leaders in their field.”
photo credit: Cadens Medical Imaging