MOONLIGHT AI: COMPUTER VISION TAKES CANCER DIAGNOSTICS GLOBAL

From Switzerland Innovation Park Basel Area – Jura Campus, Moonlight AI is scaling its computer vision platform for cancer diagnostics internationally, with a growing team across Europe and North Africa.

«Switzerland Innovation Park Basel Area – Jura Campus has provided a great, central location for Moonlight AI. Here, we meet our peers, our consultants, and other startup founders, often over coffee, to discuss projects, challenges, and solutions.»

Christian Ruiz

Co-founder, Moonlight AI

Moonlight AI has a global ambition: to make advanced cancer diagnostics available to patients around the world. Today, most new cancer drugs that come onto the market require extensive molecular testing to identify the patients who will benefit. Yet these technologies require large laboratory infrastructure, are slow, have a long turnaround time and are very expensive – which is why most patients still do not have access to them. Co-founder Christian Ruiz and his colleagues built Moonlight AI to change that.

The company’s solution is AI-powered computer vision. Its software analyzes images from routinely collected blood smears, from which it directly detects genomic biomarkers and diagnoses complex diseases. Rather than requiring laboratories to invest in entirely new equipment or workflows, the technology is designed to integrate seamlessly into existing diagnostic processes. Any laboratory that already works with blood smear images can implement it, a decisive advantage for international scale-up.

That ambition has been nurtured by the Basel Area ecosystem from the start. Early on, the team took part in Basel Area Business & Innovation’s DayOne Tech program – now part of the InnoJura Accelerator – which provided infrastructure, a location and connections to experts who truly understand healthcare. The value of those connections endures: four years later, the intellectual property lawyer Moonlight AI met through the program still leads the company’s IP strategy and helps protect its innovations. As the company grew, Switzerland Innovation Park Basel Area – Jura Campus became its long-term home, offering a central location, support from the canton and a community of founders, consultants and peers.

From this base, international scale-up is now under way. Moonlight AI recently closed a US$3.3 million seed round to finalize the development of its computer vision platform, expand its team across Europe and North Africa, curate the datasets needed to further improve its algorithms, and prepare the technology for commercialization. For Ruiz, the funding is a means to a bigger end: putting advanced cancer diagnostics within reach of patients around the world who today have no access to them.

Key Facts

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    Seed round to fuel international growth

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    Regions of team expansion: Europe & North Africa

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    Routine blood smear image is all the AI needs

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    New lab equipment required

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