Waiv, a Paris-based precision diagnostics company, has secured $33 million in a financing round to accelerate the global rollout of its AI-powered oncology testing platform. The raise also marks the company's formal spin-out from Owkin, where the team previously operated under the name Owkin Dx. The round was co-led by OTB Ventures and Alpha Intelligence Capital, with additional participation from Serena Data Ventures, Karista, and SistaFund.
What is clear, however, is the ambition behind the raise: Waiv wants to make AI precision testing the standard for cancer diagnostics worldwide, reaching laboratories and healthcare providers far beyond its current clinical deployments.
Oncology has grown considerably more complex over the past decade. Treatment decisions now rely on multiple biological signals at once, and the demand for faster, deeper diagnostic insights has moved well ahead of what traditional tools can reliably deliver. Waiv is building the infrastructure that this next era of cancer care needs.
The company turns routinely collected digital pathology slides and clinical data into AI-native precision tests, surfacing actionable biological information that would otherwise go unnoticed. The goal is not just faster results but better ones: tests that help clinicians match patients to the therapies most likely to work.
Waiv is not a pre-revenue concept. Its products are already deployed in clinical settings. RlapsRisk BC, MSIntuit Suite, and BRCAura are in active use, supporting laboratories, clinicians, and drug developers with biomarker discovery, detection, and treatment-response analysis. These tools work with data generated in routine care, which means they do not require new infrastructure or special collection processes.
The platform combines large-scale multimodal data with proprietary AI and sits on three operational foundations. The first is an extensive data network anchored by the PortrAIt consortium, one of Europe's most comprehensive multi-institutional data initiatives. The second is an end-to-end AI platform that integrates Waiv's foundational models, multimodal analytics, and clinical validation into a single stack. The third is Destra, an interoperable digital pathology platform that lets pathologists and labs run Waiv's test suite inside the workflows they already use.
Waiv plans to deploy the $33 million across three main priorities. The company will expand its portfolio of clinical-grade multimodal tests, deepen its pharmaceutical integrations across research and development pipelines, and push into new international markets. The aim is to bring more laboratories and healthcare providers into the platform, particularly in geographies where access to precision testing remains limited.
On the pharmaceutical side, Waiv already has established partnerships with major life science companies. These include an AI-based germline BRCA pre-screening test for breast cancer derived from standard H&E slides, and a collaboration with MSD focused on AI identification of an MSI-enriched patient population. These partnerships are not pilots; they represent active clinical-stage work that the new funding is designed to expand.
Waiv was founded by Meriem Sefta and her co-founders, emerging from the diagnostics division of Owkin, the AI biotech firm known for its work at the intersection of machine learning and medical research. The spin-out structure gives Waiv independence while preserving access to the scientific foundation and data infrastructure built at Owkin.
The company sits at a specific and well-defined point in the diagnostic value chain, between routine care and treatment decisions. Its platform does not replace pathologists or clinicians; it gives them better information, faster. By processing standard pathology images through its AI models, Waiv can generate insights that would ordinarily require expensive, time-consuming molecular testing.
What makes the company particularly distinctive is its ability to combine clinical-grade rigor with real-world scalability. Its products have been validated in clinical environments, not just research settings, and they operate through existing laboratory infrastructure.
OTB Ventures and Alpha Intelligence Capital co-led the round, bringing a combination of deep tech and healthcare AI experience to Waiv's cap table. The raise also drew participation from Serena Data Ventures, Karista, and SistaFund, rounding out a European investor syndicate with complementary focus areas. SistaFund, in particular, is known for backing companies with strong female leadership.
Meriem Sefta, CEO and Co-Founder of Waiv, framed the company's mission plainly: "Our goal is to make accurate AI-enabled precision testing the global standard."
Karol Szubstarski, Partner at OTB Ventures, pointed to the platform's technical depth as the deciding factor: "Their AI tech stack, built on advanced foundation models, can convert routine pathology slides into high-resolution maps of disease biology, providing both generalizability and scalability across different clinical settings."
The backing from OTB signals that Waiv's clinical traction and pharma partnerships are being read not just as proof of concept, but as a foundation for meaningful commercial scale.
