UCL spinout Octopath AI raises £1.5M to speed up cancer pathology
What's the deal? OctopathDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → AI, a UCL spinout building AI models for digital pathology, has raised £1.5 million in combined seed and grant funding. TwinPath Ventures led the round, and a £500,000 Innovate UK grant was unlocked on a matched basis by the investment.
What's the endgame? The company develops two foundation models, Kraken and Nemo, which analyse routine tissue slides at single-cell resolution in under two minutes. They generate measurements including cell counts, densities, and spatial relationships — detail that would be impractical to assess by eye.
The models are trained on more than 14 million individually labelled cells across 14 cancer types, using spatial-omics data that preserves where biological molecules sit within a tissue. Octopath says its platform analyses every cell rather than relying on estimates from selected areas. The funding will support clinical evaluation, product development, and work towards regulatory approval.
Why now? The round, announced during National Pathology Week, lands as cancer services strain. In May 2026, more than 55,000 people in England waited longer than the NHSDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → four-week standard to learn whether they had cancer, while only 3% of UK histopathology departments report enough staff to meet demand.
In their words: "Pathologists are being asked to do more with the same slides and the same hours," said Esther Bär, co-founder and chief executive officer. "The information we need is already there on the glass; it just never comes off it."
Octopath AI was founded by Zhuoyan Shen, Charles-Antoine Collins Fekete, and Esther Bär, out of UCL's Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. The platform is already deployed at five sites, including University College London Hospitals, where it processes around 200 anonymised slides a day, and samples from four clinical trials are being assessed.
The signal: Digital pathology is attracting capital and NHS infrastructure alike, with the national digital pathology network reaching 15 sites in July 2026. Octopath's round is modest next to peers — Aiforia secured €20 million in August and Waiv raised $33 million in March — but the harder test is clinical validation and integration into routine care, not speed alone.
Read more: uclventures.com
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