Kiro: super-powers through AI

“We asked ourselves, why is it that in other areas digital is everywhere, yet in medicine, we are still struggling to make sense of data?” says Alexandre Guenoun, co-founder  and CEO of Kiro (ex-Byond), a French deeptech company that uses artificial intelligence to analyse medical data from clinical laboratories. “Think of finance or trade for example, or advertising – we are able to look at extremely detailed information, analyse at a super-micro-level, and fine-tune our actions. Well, this is what we want to do in medicine.”

Kiro works with patients, medical professionals and laboratories to help them make more sense of lab results and clinical data. “Lab results are often complex to comprehend. You need to simultaneously consider so many different data points and extract useful information while also considering their evolution with time… That could easily be overwhelming for professionals and an unpleasant experience for patients. This is where we bring in artificial intelligence: to help patients with their understanding and to support doctors and clinical biologists in analysing the data faster and more reliably. Laboratory medicine is critical for all decision-making affecting diagnosis or treatment. Our job is not to make decisions nor diagnosis – that’s for healthcare professionals - we ultimately want to give these professionals the super-powers they need so that they can make a more informed decision.”

In late 2019, Kiro received seed financing in the form of an equity investment from Kurma Partners, a venture capital firm backed by the EIF. With this investment, the company was able to hire seven persons and push ahead with developing their product. “We were able to build the first layer of the solution,” explains Alexandre, “and start testing for market fit. Now we’re working on validating it in order to commercialise soon. Healthcare is a very national matter, so we’re focussed on France right now, but we are looking to internationalise and expand to the US in due course.”

In parallel, Kiro has also been active on the Covid-19 front, teaming up with AP-HM hospital group in Marseille on a research project: “We wanted to see if our AI technology could be used to find low-level signals in the Covid pathology. It’s still an early-stage, new pathology - are we able to use AI to better understand its dynamics? Which organs are impacted, what’s happening?” he explains. “I think the most exciting benefit of AI for medicine is the capacity to provide targeted and optimal care at scale. There’s a lot of potential for medicine to grow in this direction, using machine-learning and technology to improve the services of healthcare professionals and, at the end of the day, patient care. We built Kiro to make this happen.”

Company: Kiro (France)

Type of business: AI, healthcare

Financial intermediary: Kurma Partners 

EIF financing: RCR mandate and own resources

For further information about EIF intermediaries in France, please refer to: http://www.eif.org/what_we_do/where/fr/index.htm