Choosing the proper cancer treatment can be a shot in the dark. That’s because the best treatment can depend on specific aspects of a tumor, which doctors can’t always identify. Anirudh Joshi (with cofounders Damir Vrabac, 28, and Viswesh Krishna, 23) started Palo Alto, California–based Valar Labs hoping to deliver that crucial information. Valar, which has raised $26 million in VC funding, feeds images of patients’ tumors (limited for now to bladder cancer) into its AI models to suggest the best treatment. “We weren’t physicians, we weren’t oncologists coming into the field,” says Joshi, an engineer by training. “I realized where medical devices could be transformative was on the software side.” A study of more than a thousand bladder cancer patients found that Valar’s first AItest, called Vesta, was able to accurately determine whether a typical treatment would be effective. Patients can now access the test with their physicians at 20 hospitals around the nation and get reimbursed by their insurance companies. Joshi says Valar could be “the next billion-dollar company in cancer,” and he’s working on developing similar tests for more cancer types, including pancreatic, ovarian and lymphoma. Because they are software, Vesta’s products do not currently require FDA oversight.

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