Oncology software startup Radformation raises $1.6 million to automate cancer treatment workflows

After a windfall first half of 2018, featuring New York-based healthtech startups raising millions of dollars in funding, the Big Apple’s oncology community is looking towards newly seed funded Radformation, an oncology startup founded by three physicists. The  startup announced it has just closed $1.6 million in seed round financing led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and a group of successful angel investors. The funding will be used to hire more software engineers to build out its rapidly growing product offering and add to its sales and service team to support its growing roster of clinical clients in the United States and abroad.

Founded in 2014 by a team of medical physicists and medical device experts building software to automate workflow in cancer treatment, the New York-based Radformation is  an early-stage oncology software  and one of the leading next wave of New York’s cancer fighting startups. Its solutions helps save time, eliminate planning errors, enable you to design the optimal treatment for your patients, and improve quality in cancer clinics.

Kurt Sysock and co-founders Alan Nelson and Elisabeth van Wie began laying the groundwork for Radformation in 2016, after all three left their jobs working as medical physicists in the cancer clinic. It was during their time working in the cancer clinic that they saw firsthand the frustrations of manually putting together complex treatment plans for patients–which is how they got nearly 100 clinics onboard with using their platform in just their first year of having a product.

“I was super impressed with their business traction for such a young company–especially given that no one on the team had a sales background,” offered Charlie O’Donnell, Partner at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. “Their industry knowledge and experience gave them extremely good insight into what oncology clinics needed and wanted, and they’ve been exceptional about closing new sales given such a small team.”

“The increased complexity of radiation cancer treatments has led to an increase in the number of ways for clinicians to make mistakes in the cancer clinic as well as an increase in the amount of time it takes to create a patient treatment plan,” said Kurt Sysock, co-founder and CEO of Radformation who previously worked at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “Radformation’s FDA 510(k) cleared software allows clinics to catch errors quickly at the source and automate generation of high quality treatment plans much faster than today’s current manual methods.”

Over $150 billion is spent annually on cancer treatments in the United States alone and cancer accounts for 1 in every 7 deaths worldwide. Radformation leverages clinical best practices and advanced algorithms to automate the error checking and plan generation process to create the highest quality plans possible. In this way, Radformation helps clinics provide their patients with optimal treatments and avoid patient harm. The software is compatible with a wide range of cancer treatment sites, and generates optimal treatment plans in minutes, expediting a process that used to require hours to perform.

Cancer clinics and patients both stand to benefit from Radformation’s software as the team has a deep understanding of the problems cancer clinics face after working in the field for many years. Alan Nelson, DMP, received his therapeutic medical physics board certification from the American Board of Radiology in 2014, serves as the company’s Chief Scientific Officer. Elisabeth van Wie, MS, received her therapeutic medical physics board certification from the American Board of Radiology in 2014, serves as the company’s Chief Business Officer. Kurt Sysock, MMP, received his therapeutic medical physics board certification from the American Board of Radiology in 2014, serves as the company’s Chief Executive Officer.