KenSci, an analytics startup that uses AI to cut health care costs, has attracted $22 million in Series B financing led by Polaris Partners. KenSci said that it will use the new funds to explore new markets and accelerate product development.

Kyle Wiggers reported on Ken Sci for VentureBeat:

KenSci’s mission is to reduce those costs with artificial intelligence (AI). The Seattle-based startup, which has offices in Singapore and Hyderabad, was founded in 2014 by a team of researchers at the University of Washington Tacoma and incubated at the college’s Center for Data Science. (Two longtime friends — University of Washington Tacoma professor Ankur Teredesai and former Microsoft executive Samir Manjure — made up the inaugural executive team.) KenSci’s AI-driven prediction platform helps practitioners cut costs intelligently by identifying contributing clinical and financial factors and by analyzing data across sources like electronic medical records, public records, demographics, claims data, and devices.

[…]

KenSci provides a library of more than 150 prebuilt models that allow its clients to integrate the company’s platform into existing visualization and reporting workflows. To ensure a baseline-beating level of accuracy, the models are trained on two years of data from customers’ patient populations and used to make predictions for a third year. These predictions are validated against the actual outcomes for that year. The system takes into account hundreds of variables for each patient to forecast health risks stemming from conditions like sepsis, cancer, and heart attacks, with the goal of minimizing hospital readmission, over-use of emergency room services, and other pain points.

“KenSci has rapidly scaled to become one of the leading names in health care AI in a fast-growing market,” said Brian Chee, partner at Polaris Partners. “What KenSci has accomplished in the last three years is extremely exciting, and we’re thrilled to partner with them and work toward their mission to help health care organization truly realize the potential of AI.”

The company isn’t a fly-by-night operation. It has 25 peer-reviewed papers to its name — published over the course of seven years — and has attracted funding from Microsoft’s Azure4Research grant program. Moreover, last year KenSci was recognized as winner of Microsoft’s Health Innovation Awards for the best use of AI and machine learning.