It doesn’t take expert-level intelligence to distinguish between a muffin and a chihuahua, but identifying cancer-bearing cells in a microscopic image of a skin lesion is a different ball game. The first became an AI meme, while the second can mean the difference between life and death. In healthcare, AI hallucinations are simply unacceptable. As in many aspects of life, where the quality of what you put in dictates the quality of what you get out, the effectiveness of an AI model depends on the quality of its training data. If the data is incomplete, biased, or otherwise flawed, the model may learn incorrect patterns, resulting in inaccurate predictions and potentially dangerous outcomes.
Otherwise stated, with AI it’s garbage in, garbage out. While nearly one-third of the world’s data is generated by the healthcare industry, the majority is unstructured or poorly annotated (a.k.a., garbage). That’s why the healthcare industry depends on expert-quality datasets to train its AI models effectively.
This reliance also explains why the healthcare sector has lagged in AI adoption: acquiring such expert-quality data takes a long time and is prohibitively expensive for most innovators. That's why we're excited to be leading Centaur Labs' $16M+ Series B funding, with participation from new investors Samsung Next and Alumni Ventures, and from existing investors Y Combinator, Matrix, Accel, Susa, and Omega, as they continue their mission to change that.
Centaur Labs helps its customers build healthcare AI faster and more affordably by using the collective intelligence of the crowd to label multimodal data at an expert level. Centaur’s HIPAA-compliant network of skilled annotators is more accurate than outsourced experts and can produce annotations orders of magnitude faster than in-house teams.
“We knew we couldn’t rely on individual neuroradiologists—or traditional, nonmedical outsourced labeling services—to segment different kinds of hemorrhages in thousands of brain CT scans. Centaur tackled this problem quickly and accurately, enabling us to focus our time on building cutting-edge AI.”
—Raahil Sha, CTO, Zeta Surgical*
How does Centaur Labs do it?
Centaur harnesses the wisdom of their crowd by continually monitoring the individual performance of each annotator and then intelligently combining the opinions of only the top performers. Their mobile app, DiagnosUs, gamifies data labeling with pay-for-performance incentives for annotators, leading to faster, more cost-effective, and more accurate annotations compared to traditional outsourced or expert services. For those needing certified expert labels or a DIY annotation platform, Centaur Labs also offers a robust network of expert annotators and a versatile self-service platform. Used by leading medical device, software, pharma, and digital health companies, Centaur Labs supports data annotations for model training, evaluation, monitoring, and more. Their end-to-end solution is perfect for teams looking to scale their annotation processes efficiently, affordably, and with higher accuracy.
For Eight Sleep, the Centaur Labs crowd annotated complex spectrograms and chest vibration waveforms to improve their snore detection model accuracy from 70% to 93%. For Paige’s pathology algorithm, Centaur Labs identified key cellular features within breast cancer tissue 10x faster than their prior solution and improved the model’s F1 score from 0.6 to 0.78. “Centaur Labs annotated the first batch of data so quickly it seemed unreal. The speed of annotations we can now get is tenfold—we can get 1,000 high-quality annotations in one day,” said Fausto Milletarì, Senior AI Scientist at Paige.
Centaur Labs’ ability to achieve expert-level quality annotations by harnessing the collective intelligence of the crowd was the brainchild of CEO Erik Duhaime. Erik completed his PhD at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, an institute focused on studying how a group of people, enhanced by technology, can collectively be more than the sum of its parts. We’ve seen the proof points of Erik’s thesis through Centaur Labs’ ability to exceed customer expectations: delivering expert-quality healthcare data annotations at a speed, cost, and scale that can keep up with the demands of their AI initiatives. Centaur Labs is taking advantage of the rapidly growing healthcare AI market by providing a one-stop shop for all healthcare data annotations. The solution works across modalities and meets the complexity and specificity required for medical AI. This unique combination of vertical expertise and technical capabilities across modalities positions Centaur Labs as a foundational platform for the next generation of healthcare AI, and we’re thrilled to contribute to their progress.
Why Centaur Labs chose SignalFire
Investing in Centaur Labs was a no-brainer for us, but every investment is a partnership, and we’re honored that CEO Erik Duhaime* chose to work with us. From his perspective, “We knew we wanted a lead investor that deeply understood AI, but we didn't expect to find a firm where AI is such a core part of their DNA. On top of that, SignalFire's portfolio support is truly exceptional—they're really raising the bar in terms of how much a VC can add value beyond just financing.”
Part of the draw for Erik was our XIR program, which pairs top industry leaders with high-potential companies as they scale. SignalFire XIR, Jeff Butler**, joined us in pursuit of Centaur Labs and will play an active role on the board and as an advisor to the company. Jeff is the founder and former CEO of Privia Health (NASDAQ: PRVA), the co-founder and former CEO of BroadReach Healthcare, and a Director of The Advisory Board Company (acquired by United Health & Vista for $2.6B). His enthusiasm for the intersection of AI and healthcare was evident from the outset, and his distinguished career highlighted both the pressing challenges and the immense value of this opportunity.
We’re grateful for the opportunity to work closely with Jeff and to leverage his extensive experience in advancing Centaur Lab’s vision.
"SignalFire's XIR program is a great fit for what I was looking for in this next chapter of my career, enabling experienced founders and operators to take an active role in helping advance disruptive technologies like AI—while at the same time paying it forward and supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs. I've really enjoyed my experience so far, especially in getting to know and working closely with the whole SignalFire team."
—Jeff Butler, Founder, Privia Health
SignalFire will continue investing in the intersection of healthcare and AI as it evolves over the next decade. We have no doubt that medical data labeling will only increase in importance as innovators build toward a more efficient, connected, and holistic healthcare infrastructure. With Centaur Labs, we’re investing in that future. If you’re building at the intersection of AI and healthcare, consider Centaur Labs as a data partner; you can reach the team at centaurlabs.com.
We’d also love to hear from you! We’re always excited to learn what founders are building in healthcare AI and are eager to explore how we can collaborate to transform the industry together. If you’re interested in starting a conversation, please contact YY at yy@signalfire.com or Adele at adele@signalfire.com. We look forward to meeting you soon.
** SignalFire may engage Affiliate Advisors, Retained Advisors, and other consultants as listed above to provide their expertise on a formal or ad hoc basis. They are not employed by SignalFire and do not provide investment advisory services to clients on behalf of SignalFire. For more information on their specific roles, please contact us. Portfolio Company Endorsements: Certain portfolio company founders listed above have not received any compensation for this feedback and did not invest in a SignalFire fund. Please refer to our website for additional disclosures.
*Portfolio company founders listed above have not received any compensation for this feedback and may or may not have invested in a SignalFire fund. These founders may or may not serve as Affiliate Advisors, Retained Advisors, or consultants to provide their expertise on a formal or ad hoc basis. They are not employed by SignalFire and do not provide investment advisory services to clients on behalf of SignalFire. Please refer to our disclosures page for additional disclosures.
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