As healthcare gets more and more expensive, the medical industry is constantly looking for new technologies to lower costs without sacrificing the quality of care. Seattle-based startup KenSci Inc. offers one such solution that uses machine learning to predict when people will get sick and how they should be treated before an illness even shows up.

KenSci announced today that it has closed an impressive $8.5 million Series A funding round, which will allow it to grow its platform to better meet the needs of healthcare providers. The funding round was led by Ignition Partners, along with participation from Osage University Partners and Mindset Ventures.

Founded by data science professor Ankur Teredesai and former Microsoft Corp. exec Samir Manjure (pictured), KenSci uses machine learning to give doctors and hospitals insights into which people are the most likely to get sick, how sick they could become and what treatment methods would be most effective for those illnesses.

KenSci began at an incubator at the University of Washington Tacoma before being spun out in 2015. Since then, the company has developed more than 120 machine learning models that support a wide range of business and healthcare needs.

KenSci bills itself as “the world’s first vertically integrated machine learning platform for healthcare.” According to the company’s website, it can provide customers with a customized machine learning implementation within 12 weeks. In a statement, Manjure noted that healthcare providers already have a wealth of valuable data, but they are unable to leverage it without a system such as KenSci’s.

“The challenge in healthcare analytics is not in the lack of data but in the ability to connect and combine data meaningfully to unearth patterns and predict risks. Legacy systems of records have created walled gardens, unwittingly causing poor health outcomes and creating an upward spiral in healthcare costs,” said Manjure, who serves as KenSci’s chief executive. “We are engineering a system of insight, on top of these legacy systems, to help enable our customers to predict and intervene ahead of time rather than drive looking backward.”

Medicine has become one of the hottest industries for machine learning, with a number of AI healthcare projects from major companies like IBM Corp., Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft. During IBM’s recent fourth-quarter earnings call, IBM Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter noted that the company’s Watson Health platform is used by 35 hospital systems and more than 10,000 clients and partners.

Image courtesy of KenSci