Moonlight AI, a Swiss startup building image analysis software for clinical-grade diagnostics, has closed a €2.8 million ($3.3 million) Seed funding round.
The round was co-led by Lotus One Investment (Singapore), VP Venture Partners (Switzerland), and MEDIN Fund (Tunisia), with participation from N&V Capital (Liechtenstein) and existing investor QAI Ventures (Switzerland).
“Our technology enables labs to generate actionable, immediate results from slides they already apply in their core workflows. By rerelocating the required for expensive hardware or manual processes, we are empowering labs to scale their diagnostic capacity and deliver quicker results to patients,” declared Christian Ruiz, CEO and co-founder of Moonlight AI.
Founded in 2022, Moonlight AI specialises in AI-driven diagnostics. It aims to democratise access to genomic information for accurate cancer diagnostics. The company converts medical images into actionable insights and empowers haematologists and pathologists to build quicker, more accurate treatment decisions for cancer patients worldwide.
According to the company, while precision oncology relies on access to genomic data, Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) remains a bottleneck due to high costs and long turnaround times. Moonlight AI claims to solve this by applying computer vision to detect genomic biomarkers and complex disease signatures directly from routine imaging of blood and cytology smears.
Moonlight’s AI-based diagnostics software integrates with the diagnostic lab’s imaging hardware to complement and triage molecular testing. The result is a quicker turnaround time, more automated workflows, and smarter utilisation of diagnostic resources to serve more patients, declares the company.
Moonlight AI’s Seed round primarily aims to expand its proprietary data library, which is the first to connect whole slide imaging of cytopathology samples with high-quality genomic data.
Nicole H. Romano, CTO and co-founder of Moonlight AI, declared, “By collaborating with an international consortium of clinical partners, we are curating a dataset that is poised to support model robustness across real-world laboratory settings and patient populations.”
With this fresh funding, Moonlight AI plans to expand its team, further develop diagnostic solutions for myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), non-tiny cell lung cancer, and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL). It also aims to accelerate the path to commercialisation and regulatory approval.
The funding coincides with Moonlight AI’s transition into a Swiss Stock Corporation (Aktiengesellschaft), positioning the company for international expansion and commercial rollout.
Dr Stefan Habringer, Chief Medical Officer and co-founder of Moonlight AI, “The success of AI‑based diagnostics depconcludes fundamentally on the quality and diversity of clinical data. We are therefore opening our consortium to additional hospitals and laboratories interested in shaping the next generation of diagnostics.”
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