Artificial intelligence can find hidden signals in data across healthcare, and firms like Nvidia are leaning into what this could mean. For instance, it announced two dozen recent AI-powered tools last week for areas including biotechnology and drug discovery. And Nvidia is just not alone.

Century Health is a recent startup also getting in on the motion. It’s applying AI to clinical data to uncover recent applications for drugs. It’s working with pharmaceutical firms and researchers, initially at Yale and UC San Diego, to discover and commercialize the subsequent breakthrough for diseases, like Alzheimer’s, that affect tens of tens of millions of patients.

The mission is a private one for Century Health’s co-founder and CEO, Vish Srivastava. He watched his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s get to the purpose where he didn’t recognize Srivastava anymore.

“That sent me down a rabbit hole,” said Srivastava, whose background is in healthcare product development and data. “One in all the largest issues around innovation for brand spanking new treatments is efficient access to good patient data. That is now only possible due to generative AI. That data sat around for many years since it takes manual effort to normalize and extract insight from it.”

That’s when he teamed up with friend Sanjay Hariharan, a knowledge scientist and applied AI engineer, to form Century Health. They built a platform to extract that hidden data and aggregate it. Researchers and pharma firms subscribe to the platform and may then use that data on approved drugs; to expand to recent drugs; or to seek out insights to expand access to drugs which have already been approved.

The last word goal is accelerating access to treatments, Srivastava said.

“Drug development is massively expensive, and on average, takes $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a recent drug,” he said. “From the pharma company’s perspective, when their drug is now approved, the mission is to get it to patients as quickly as possible. For us, that also means as affordably as possible with access to good real-world data.”

Now with $2 million pre-seed funding, Century Health will run three to 5 pilots over the subsequent several months. The goal is to validate the initial technology that collects the info and, most significantly, to see the impact the insights from those data sets can bring, Srivastava said.

He sees these pilots as design partnerships and a method to get feedback on the advantages of medicine, for instance, which patient subpopulation may be underrepresented. Along with the validated technology, one other milestone might be to secure early revenue from the pilots, which Century Health can leverage to go after one other round of enterprise capital.

The investment was led by 2048 Ventures with participation from LifeX, All over the place, Alumni Ventures and a gaggle of angel investors, including Datavant founder Travis May and Evidation founder and CEO Christine Lemke.

Alex Iskold, managing partner of 2048 Ventures, said in an announcement, “At 2048 Ventures we have now a powerful thesis around real-time data, in healthcare and beyond. Vish and Sanjay have a vision to leverage AI and real world patient data to unlock a greater feedback loop and ultimately faster and more efficient drug development and commercialization.”