Exclusive: Not all cancer patients need chemo. Ataraxis AI raised $20M to fix that.

Artificial intelligence is a huge trend in cancer care, focusing mainly on the earliest stages of cancer detection. This makes sense because the earlier the cancer is, the less fatal it is to detect it.

But, less ask another basic question: Is it an active treatment like chemotherapy if someone does have cancer? This is the problem Ataraxis AI is trying to solve.

The New York-based startup focuses on using AI to accurately predict whether patients have cancer or not, and can also predict how cancer outcomes will look like in five to ten years. If only a small cancer may appear, chemotherapy can be avoided altogether – saving a lot of money while avoiding the infamous side effects of treating.

Ataraxis AI is now planning to launch its first commercial test to our oncologists in the next few months, its co-founder Jan Witowski told TechCrunch. To strengthen launches and expand to other types of cancer, the startup has raised $20.4 million in Series A, which it specifically tells TechCrunch.

The round is led by Aix Ventures, from Thiel Bio, Founders Foundation, Floating Point, Bertelsmann, and existing investor giants venture capital and obvious venture capital. ataraxis Appeared Last year, he received a $4 million seed round from Stealth.

Ataraxis was co-founded by Witowski and Krzysztof Geras, an assistant professor at NYU School of Medicine, focusing on AI.

Ataraxis’ technology is powered by an AI model that extracts information from high-resolution images of cancer cells. Widowski said the model was trained on hundreds of millions of actual images of hundreds of millions of patients. A recent study showed that the Ataraxis technology for each ataraxis is 30% more accurate than current standards of breast cancer care.

In the long run, ataraxis has great ambitions. It hopes to have at least half of the new cancer cases by 2030. Yann Lecun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta As an AI consultant.

“I think on Ataraxis, we’re trying to build what is essentially an AI Frontier lab, but for healthcare applications,” Witowski said. “Because many problems require a very novel technology.”

The AI ​​boom has led to fundraising for cancer care startups. Valar Laboratory Raised $22 million For example, to help patients find out their treatment plan in May 2024. There are also many AI-powered drug discovery companies in the cancer field, such as Manas AI. Raised $24.6 million in January 2025 and was co-founded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.