Agora Labs raises €4.3M to expand clinical data infrastructure for medical research

Italian deeptech firm Agora Labs has secured €4.3 million in funding to bolster its clinical data infrastructure for medical research, as reported by a venture capital firm led by P101 SGR. The round of investment, spearheaded by P101 SGR, was joined by the Mussetto family, who own Infinite Five, a holding company dedicated to marketing technology, data analysis, and robotics.

Founded by Davide Zaccagnini, a vascular surgeon and biomedical informatician, and Fabio Giulietto, an engineer, Agora Labs specializes in facilitating hospitals' access to clinical data for research purposes while ensuring patient privacy remains intact.

Clinical data, generated by hospitals in vast quantities, holds significant potential for advancing medical research and the creation of innovative diagnostic and therapeutic solutions. However, much of this information remains inaccessible and challenging to analyze due to fragmentation across various IT systems and unstructured formats. Agora Labs seeks to tackle this issue by providing hospitals with a tailored infrastructure that processes and standardizes clinical data without moving it outside their own systems.

To achieve this, Agora Labs deploys dedicated computing nodes at participating healthcare facilities, leveraging GPUs provided by NVIDIA. Specialized large language models (LLMs) are then employed to structure and standardize the data, while anonymization processes safeguard patient information. Through federated AI technology, the infrastructure connects hospitals, enabling research centers and pharmaceutical companies to conduct studies using data from multiple healthcare facilities without directly accessing patient records.

Furthermore, AI models can undergo training and validation locally, with only their outputs and inferences shared across the network.

Currently active in an international network of 50 healthcare facilities, Agora Labs aims to double its size within the upcoming months. Founder and CEO Davide Zaccagnini expressed that the investment would enable the company to accelerate its expansion of the healthcare network and support larger international research projects.

This funding round also addresses two specific needs for Agora Labs: scaling its data network even faster and activating global-scale projects on its platform. By joining Agora Labs as a strategic investor, P101 and Infinite Five aim to bring valuable resources such as experience, market understanding, international credibility, and genuine collaborative efforts to the board, ultimately bolstering the company's standing in the Real World Evidence (RWE) market.