Figure 1, a Digital Media Zone at Ryerson University (DMZ) alumni company recently secured $2 million in seed funding that the startup will to help expedite its growth. Figure 1’s healthcare photo sharing app was incubated at the DMZ from December 2012 to August 2013 and also completed the Ryerson Futures accelerator program.
The funding round was co-led by Version One Ventures and Rho Canada Ventures, a division of New York-based Rho Capital Partners. It also included the Investment Accelerator Fund, and a number of prominent angel investors, such as Zen Chu (Founder of Accelerated Medical Ventures and Faculty Director at MIT’s HackingMedicine) and Daniel Debow (Co-Founder of Rypple, acquired by Salesforce.com) and DMZ Investments, a seed-stage fund established by Ryerson Futures.
Figure 1’s goal is to build the world’s largest free repository of medical images that can easily be searched and made available to the medical community. It is a mobile, crowdsourced platform that allows healthcare professionals to upload and tag images, use each other’s images for information, and rate images for accuracy or clinical representativeness.