Context

Datalchemy supports Chipiron, an innovative start-up whose mission is “to put an end to cancer thanks to scalable MRI technologies”.

Today, access to MRI – the most accurate, safe and non-invasive imaging modality – remains limited by its high cost, cumbersome infrastructure and hospital compatibility constraints. To enable widespread screening and image-guided therapies, accessibility needs to be multiplied by 100: Chipiron is therefore developing the first full-body MRI scanner with ultra-low field strength (< 10 mT), which is lightweight, mobile (one person only), operates on a standard socket and can be used without a shielded room, without sacrificing image quality.

Support work

We set up a targeted scientific watch on AI advances applied to MRI methods, then selected and evaluated each publication according to four key axes:

  1. General confidence (1 low – 5 high): reputation of authors and laboratories, number of citations, rigor of data and clarity of results.
  2. Reproduction and maintenance effort (1 high – 5 low): availability of codebases, checkpoints and datasets, quality of documentation, responses to issues, clear separation of train/test and ablation studies.
  3. Generalizability to acquisition parameters (1 low – 5 high): robustness of results to protocol variations, theoretical arguments for independence from acquisition conditions.
  4. Expected performance (1 low – 5 high): computational cost for training and inference, image quality obtained.

Each article selected is the subject of a summary sheet with figures and comments, together with an overall “industrializability” score and recommendations for prioritizing the work to be prototyped.

Results

Thanks to this rigorous, ongoing analysis, Chipiron was able to demonstrate to its investors the scientific soundness and technical maturity of its project. This directly contributed to the closing of a $17 million Series A round at the end of April 2025, backed by Blast Club, IXCORE Group, the European Innovation Council (EIC) and Bpifrance Chipiron. This financing will enable :

  • Launch deployment of the first prototypes in Europe’s leading hospitals
  • Start clinical validation of ULF MRI solution
  • Strengthen technical, product and regulatory teams