Octopath AI secures £1.5 million to support cancer pathology

New UCL spinout Octoapth AI has raised £1.5m in combined seed and grant funding to develop its AI-powered digital pathology analysis models. 

The investment is led by TwinPath Ventures, and the launch coincides with National Pathology Week. The company has also secured a £500,000 Innovate UK grant, unlocked on a matched basis by the investment. The funding will support clinical evaluation, product development and work towards regulatory approval. 

Octopath AI was born out of research from UCL’s Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, founded by Dr Zhuoyan Shen, Dr Charles-Antoine Collins Fekete and Dr Esther Bär. The technology is designed to work alongside pathologists, supporting their important role in the patient diagnostic journey.  

Their analysis models, Kraken and Nemo, analyse routine tissue slides at single-cell resolution in under two minutes, generating measurements including cell counts, densities and spatial relationships. This gives pathologists more information in less time, capturing detail that would be impractical by eye. For example, manually estimating tumour cell density takes around 20 minutes per slide.  

The platform can analyse every cell, rather than relying on estimates from selected areas, having been trained on more than 14 million individually-labelled cells across 14 cancer types.  

The models are trained using ‘spatial-omics’ data – measurement of biological molecules such as RNA, proteins or metabolites, while preserving precisely where those molecules sit within a tissue. 

UCL Ventures supported the team to protect the research, identify its market opportunity and connect them with investors. 

Helping pathology services do more with every slide 

The potential impact comes at a time when cancer services are under considerable pressure: in May 2026, more than 55,000 people in England waited longer than the NHS four-week standard to find out whether they had cancer. Meanwhile, only 3% of UK histopathology departments report having enough staff to meet clinical demand.  

For Dr Esther Bär, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Octopath AI, the opportunity is not simply to make existing analysis faster. It is to capture more useful information from tissue slides: “Pathologists are being asked to do more with the same slides and the same hours. The information we need is already there on the glass; it just never comes off it.  

“We built Octopath AI to get it out, in a form pathologists can trust and act on, without adding to their day.” 

Dr Anne Lane, Chief Executive Officer of UCL Ventures, said: “Octopath AI is a powerful example of UCL research being translated into a company with the potential to improve both patient care and the resilience of health services.”  

Testing the technology in practice 

Octopath AI is already testing its technology beyond the lab: the platform is deployed at five sites, including University College London Hospitals (UCLH), where it is processing around 200 anonymised slides a day. Samples from four clinical trials are also being assessed. 

The team is exploring applications including tumour grading, immune-cell mapping, cellularity, blood-vessel analysis and biomarker scoring.