Artificial intelligence is a big trend in cancer care, and it’s mostly focused on detecting cancer at the earliest possible stage. That makes a lot of sense, given that cancer is less deadly the earlier it’s detected.
But fewer are asking another fundamental question: if someone does have cancer, is an aggressive treatment like chemotherapy necessary? That’s the problem Ataraxis AI is trying to solve.
The New York-based startup is focused on using AI to accurately predict not only if a patient has cancer, but also what their cancer outcome looks like in 5 to 10 years. If there’s only a small chance of the cancer coming back, chemo can be avoided altogether – saving a lot of money, while avoiding the treatment’s notorious side effects.
Ataraxis AI now plans to launch their first commercial test, for breast cancer, to U.S. oncologists in the coming months, its co-founder Jan Witowski tells TechCrunch. To bolster the launch and expand into other types of cancer, the startup has raised a $20.4 million Series A, it told TechCrunch exclusively.
The round was led by AIX Ventures with participation from Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Floating Point, Bertelsmann, and existing investors Giant Ventures and Obvious Ventures. Ataraxis emerged from stealth last year with a $4 million seed round.
Ataraxis was co-founded by Witowski and Krzysztof Geras, an assistant professor at NYU’s medical school who focuses on AI.
Ataraxis’ tech is powered by an AI model that extracts information from high-resolution images of cancer cells. The model is trained on hundreds of millions of real images from thousands of patients, Witowski said. A recent study showed Ataraxis’ tech was 30% more accurate than the current standard of care for breast cancer, per Ataraxis.
Long term, Ataraxis has big ambitions. It wants its tests to impact at least half of new cancer cases by 2030. It also views itself as a frontier AI company that builds its own models, touting Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun as an AI advisor.
“I think at Ataraxis we are trying to build what is essentially an AI frontier lab, but for healthcare applications,” Witowski said. “Because so many of those problems require a very novel technology.”
The AI boom has led to a rush of fundraises for cancer care startups. Valar Labs raised $22 million to help patients figure out their treatment plan in May 2024, for example. There’s also a bevvy of AI-powered drug discovery firms in the cancer space, like Manas AI which raised $24.6 million in January 2025 and was co-founded by Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder.
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