Cambridge: Lucida Medical has raised £8.7 million i.e approximately $11.4 million to scale its AI-powered prostate cancer diagnostic platform and pursue US regulatory clearance. The round was led by IW Capital, with participation from XTX Ventures and Macmillan Cancer Support.
Lucida’s flagship product is Pi – Prostate Intelligence. The software analyses prostate MRI scans, highlights suspicious lesions, and generates risk scores to support radiologists’ decisions.
It carries CE certification and is already deployed across 15 NHS hospitals in the UK. Clinical validation across multiple NHS trusts shows Pi detects clinically significant prostate cancer at accuracy levels comparable to expert radiologists with 95% sensitivity.
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The timing reflects a real structural problem. The UK faces a 30% shortfall in clinical radiologists, a gap the Royal College of Radiologists warns could reach 40% by 2028. Cancer scan backlogs are growing.
Patients in some trusts wait two months or longer for a confirmed diagnosis. Pi targets that bottleneck directly early deployments at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust show high-risk cases flagged for same-day prioritisation.
The $11.4M will fund a future FDA submission to enter the US market where demand for AI diagnostic tools is accelerating and expand the platform beyond prostate cancer into additional cancer types.
Lucida sits at the intersection of two urgent trends. AI diagnostic software is maturing rapidly. Radiology capacity is not keeping pace with cancer volumes. The companies building clinically validated tools for that gap are attracting serious institutional backing.
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