Doctors believe Artificial Intelligence is now saving lives, after a major advancement in breast cancer screenings. A.I. is detecting early signs of the disease, in some cases years before doctors would find the cancer on a traditional scan. For every patient visit, physicians spend an average of 16 minutes and 14 seconds using electronic health records to review data and make notes, according to a 2020 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Navina, a New York-based medical tech company, has created an artificial intelligence tool to help doctors reclaim some of that time -- and ensure that important data doesn't get missed. The platform, which is also called Navina, uses generative AI to transform how data informs the physician-patient interaction, explained Ronen Lavi, the company's Israel-based CEO.

Navina, a company developing AI-powered assistant software for physicians, today announced that it raised $22 million in Series B funding led by ALIVE with participation from Grove Ventures, Vertex Ventures Israel and Schusterman Family Investments. Bringing the startup's total raised to $44 million, inclusive of a grant from the Israeli Innovation Authority, the proceeds will be put toward product development and widening Navina's footprint to home, virtual and urgent care, CEO and co-founder Ronen Lavi told TechCrunch. Navina was founded by Ronen Lavi and Shay Perera, who previously led the Israel Defense Forces' AI lab, where they say that they built AI "assistant" systems for analysts suffering from data overload. Their work there inspired the products they went on to built at Navina, which aim to help physicians drowning in medical data. "The funding comes at a pivotal time for the U.S. healthcare industry on the heels of the pandemic, when physician burnout is at an all-time high," Lavi told TechCrunch in an email interview.

Ronen Lavi and Shay Perera have spent years working to develop and deploy AI in one of the most demanding environments in the world--the elite intelligence units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Lavi established and led the AI Lab of Israel's Military Intelligence and Perera served there as manager of machine learning and computer vision research and development. After being awarded a National Security Award in 2018, they left the IDF to launch a startup, as many Israelis with similar experience and skills have done before them. The rapid digital transformation of the healthcare industry worldwide, the proliferation of healthcare data, the increasing complexity of healthcare (including its administration), the dearth of qualified personnel--and the Covid pandemic--have all contributed to a rising demand for AI solutions, intended to assist with detection, diagnosis, treatment, preventive care and wellness. The wealth of data that is produced by digitized medical records is what modern AI approaches (deep learning) require so they can "learn" from examples, automate certain decisions, and provide a helping hand to physicians and healthcare staff.