Vista AI, a Palo Alto-based startup developing automated MRI scanning software, has raised $29.5 million in Series B funding. The round included investments from major health systems Cedars-Sinai, Intermountain Health, University of Utah Hospital System, Temple University/Fox Chase Cancer Center and Tampa General Hospital, alongside Khosla Ventures and existing investors. The company's FDA-cleared cardiac MRI platform automates scanning processes to address technologist shortages. Vista AI plans to expand into brain, prostate and spine imaging, pending FDA clearance, and will offer remote scanning services. At Brigham and Women's Hospital, Vista AI enabled 50% more cardiac MRI scan slots, eliminating a 28-day backlog. Radiology Regional reduced scan times by over 50% using the platform. Vista AI has raised funding from health systems that recognise automation as essential infrastructure in radiology.

In 2017, Vinod Khosla told CNBC that the job “of the radiologist will be obsolete in five years.” While the founder of Khosla Ventures later revised that timeline to as long as 15 years, he maintained that AI image recognition could soon diagnose disease on scans better than human doctors.Seven years later, radiologists are still required to interpret most scans (even if AI software helps them); the more immediate challenge is the shortage of these doctors in the United States and around the world.While Khosla Ventures has backed several imaging startups, including Vista.ai and Q Bio, the firm’s latest bet is on a company that makes radiologists’ workload easier by reducing the time spent on report documentation, instead of trying to replace the physician with a machine.On Tuesday, Khosla led a $50 million Series B into Rad AI, which developed a tool that can generate reports for radiologists. Other participants in the round included World Innovation Lab and returning investors ARTIS Ventures, OCV Partners, Kickstart Fund and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused fund). The financing brought the company’s total capital raised to over $80 million.Rad AI was founded in 2018 by Dr. Jeff Chang, who completed his medical training as a radiologist when he was 16 and later received an MBA from UCLA, and serial entrepreneur Doktor Gurson.Since Chang knew from his own experience as a practicing doctor that the majority of radiologists’ time is spent documenting findings rather than analyzing images, the pair decided to develop a proprietary LLM trained on radiology report datasets for automating doctors’ findings and impressions documentation.While tech companies didn’t widely use generative AI until OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, Rad AI takes pride in being an early adopter of this technology. “I’m confident we’re the first company in radiology to start using LLMs,” Gurson, Rad AI’s CEO told TechCrunch. “We started doing that work in 2018, around the same time that open AI was creating their [first] models.”Six years later, Rad AI’s products are used by about a third of U.S