Dr Manish Patel (CEO), Dr Chetan Kaher (CIO) and Sarah D’Souza (COO), co-founders of Jiva ai

Good to see you all. So –

Can you tell me more about Jive.ai?

Our mission is to make it easy for anybody to use AI – to make it accessible and affordable, and reduce the need for a large data science outlay.

As co-founders, we’ve known each other for a long time, since university actually, and we share an interest in creating solutions to healthcare data challenges. Jiva.ai was founded on the premise that healthcare data couldn’t be analysed quickly without access to extensive AI expertise. 

Currently business users and research institutions face a number of problems – they may not have access to, or be able to afford to hire, a data science team so have to hire AI consultancy. This can be expensive and the IP then may subsequently belong to the consultancy.

And most real-world problems that require practical AI solutions are fragmented, so after an organisation has created an AI solution themselves, another modality may come to the fore creating the challenge of integrating new data into an existing solution – and hence another 18+ months in production.

And crucially – most modern AI solutions are not explainable. This means that the user cannot reason with an AI and understand why it behaved in the way it did.

If we think back to the 1990s – the norm would be hiring teams of developers to build website content. Now, we have the capabilities to build our own.

Jiva.ai is at the forefront of creating that autonomy in analytics.

Our team have developed a no code multi-modal accessible AI Platform for users to rapidly build their own AI models from any datatype, explain why those models have been used, incorporate multiple modalities (for example demographics, genetics, imaging, biomarkers etc) and, crucially, for users to retain all their created IP.

It’s definitely a game changer.

Who has Jive.ai been designed for?

With backgrounds in oncology, our origins are in the healthcare market.

Participating in the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, we’ve successfully demonstrated our capabilities in a number of use cases and pathway settings.

Jiva.ai is set to become the first AI-based solution, trained on 1000s of MRI scans from a variety of sources, to be used in medical imaging for prostate cancer diagnosis.

We’ve collaborated on the Innovate UK funded ID-Liver project, working with University of Manchester, Roche and GE Healthcare, to predict susceptibility to liver disease and hepatocellular carcinoma. The early results are strongly positive where Jiva.ai is able to diagnose the disease 6% better than current standard of care.

And we’ve teamed up with Robert Gordon University supported by an SBRI grant to deliver an automated tool to diagnose bone fractures quickly and efficiently.

So, we can see the potential for significant impact and an extensive range of applications for the Jiva.ai platform in healthcare – including working with research institutions integrating population health data for preventive medicine – and working in other verticals.

If you look at our use cases, we’ve demonstrated that our platform can perform using different data types – 3D imaging, 2D imaging, CS3 structured data, audio, video – so we have that versatility in applications across industry sectors and we’re driving these opportunities forward worked on diverse projects from debt finance to billboard optimisation.

What would you say have been your successes on your scale-up journey?

We have to say our team. We’ve got an incredible group of individuals.

We’re a close knit team with an impressive team of advisors – we work well together. It’s exciting to have such diversity of thought around the table. We’re incisive, we learn together really quickly, and challenge and motivate each other. We have decades of experience from different industry sectors.

We’ve recently welcomed Dr Richard Hammersley with his 25+ years experience in machine learning and AI, and earlier this year Jarrod Germano moved from OEM to SME, joining the Jiva.ai team from his SVP role at Tech Mahindra.

Everyone knows the startup journey is not easy – you can have 10 different opinions from innovation experts on which direction to take, so it’s been incredibly important to build our team and maintain our focal point. 

So yes, we are very proud of our accomplishments in our product – but we are also incredibly proud of convincing a group of such talented individuals to join us in pursuing our vision.

Jiva.ai has definitely been ahead of the market – but we now have real momentum. When Chetan demos the platform and explains to users that Jiva can train them to build AI in 30 minutes it’s like a lightbulb moment!

When we talk about success, through collaboration on the ID-Liver project, we’ve become the first AI platform to integrate with Roche Diagnostics Navify platform. As a startup this is huge for us. And we’ve created significant IP in our prostate cancer diagnostic (JivaRDX), currently going through clinical investigation for UKCA and FDA certification.

What connections / partnerships are you seeking to make for the next stage of your business growth?

We’re looking to establish channel partnerships with Seed and Series A-funded medtech companies looking to augment AI into their products or optimise their internal capabilities. We can see the mutual benefit in these partnerships – with partners benefiting from our technology augmentation, and shared future cost savings and regulatory alignment. 

We’ve previously raised £1.5M and have been awarded >£400k in grants. We are now raising £4.5M in a seed bridge round. We have term sheets with existing investors and we are looking for large VC investment, with our funding round split over 2 closes, this year and early next year.

And finally, can you tell us about your experience of participating in the P4SY Accelerator Programme?

It’s been good in terms of the online events and insights, and the opportunities to meet with senior representation at universities and the introduction to Medipex. We’ve had some really good conversations with regional partners but we now need to move this forward into project activity.

You can find out more on the Jiva ai website, viewing a demonstration here, or contact info@jiva.ai