SACRAMENTO, Calif., Sept. 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Sophont, a medical AI startup, announced the closing of its $9.22M pre-seed and seed funding round led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from Upfront Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Jeff Dean (Google DeepMind), Logan Kilpatrick (Google DeepMind), Lukas Biewald (Weights & Biases), Clément Delangue (Factorial Capital, Hugging Face), and other investors.
Sophont is building multimodal medical foundation models: large-scale AI systems trained on vast amounts of unlabeled clinical data that can reason across diverse modalities, including pathology slides, brain scans, clinical notes, and lab results. Sophont is the first medical AI startup built in true partnership with academics, clinicians, and the broader machine learning community. The company’s initial focus is providing medical AI infrastructure, with plans to release state-of-the-art model backbones later this year to enable med-tech companies and pharmaceutical R&D teams to fine-tune models for symptom triage, biomarker discovery, patient selection for clinical trials, and more.
“Current medical AI is like the parable of the blind men and the elephant—each model sees one part, but none sees the whole patient. We’re building an AI that can finally see the elephant.”- Tanishq Mathew Abraham, PhD, CEO.
At 21, Tanishq founded Sophont and became its CEO. Formerly Research Director at Stability AI and founder of MedARC, the world’s largest online medical AI research community, Tanishq became the youngest biomedical engineer at 14, and later the youngest Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at 19. Now at 22, he has seven years of experience in AI research and leadership and is now channeling his expertise into leading Sophont’s vision to redefine the future of medical AI.
Co-founder and CTO Paul Scotti, Ph,D., formerly Head of NeuroAI at Stability AI and a postdoc at Princeton University, brings over a decade of computational neuroscience experience. He previously led the development of MindEye, the leading pipeline for reconstructing visual experiences from brain scans.
Together, they collaborate with international medical centers and academic institutions, publishing open-source medical AI research in venues including Nature Biomedical Engineering, NeurIPS, and ICML.
Seed rounds in healthcare AI typically range from $1M–$4M, making Sophont’s $9.22M raise notably large. Funds will be used to expand the research team, accelerate model development, and launch pilot programs with leading healthcare institutions, healthtech companies, and pharmaceutical companies.