The Next Chapter in Proscia’s Mission

Proscia is being acquired by Agilent Technologies.

Nathan Buchbinder, Coleman Stavish, and I started Proscia in our college dorm rooms with a big vision to rewire pathology for precision medicine and help change the way we fight diseases like cancer. Proscia has always been a long-term play – what would medicine look like in the next 50 years?

10 years after our founding, joining Agilent opens an exciting next chapter to accelerate our mission.

Origins & What We’ve Built

One of the most fulfilling parts of building this company has been getting to create the things we wished existed and put them out into the world. When we started, it was obvious that pathology needed to go digital and that AI would change diagnostics. We weren’t the first to believe in digital and computational pathology, even when it was an obscure research niche. But we did look at things differently than those before us. ~1B glass slides get produced every year, each of which (when digitized) tells the story of a patient's disease in billions of pixels. We set out to build the technology and economic flywheel that would turn that glass into data, and that data into a new way of practicing medicine.

Today, Proscia is the platform for pathology across life sciences and laboratories. Our products power the precision medicine value chain from discovery through diagnostics, including at 16 of the top 20 biopharma companies, and some of the largest laboratories in the world, with 32,000 cases per day.

The journey to get here was a lot less linear than it feels looking back. Generally speaking, though, we sequenced things pretty well. Any success we’ve had was a function of listening to our customers, and sometimes our guts, above all else. We built, brick-by-brick, the thing the world needed when it needed it, hired the best people, executed with persistence, and compounded momentum over a decade. We did what was “right” more than we did what was “popular.” Proscia’s tree bears fruit today because of that.

The Path Ahead

The case for digital pathology is now clear in a way that it wasn’t when we started Proscia, and I’d like to think that we, and the customers that put their trust in us, had some role to play in proving that. Labs that run on Concentriq are faster, more efficient, and more sophisticated. AI is accelerating those gains, as models are getting better faster, and what stands between them and the clinic is integration, validation, and trust, which is the work we've spent a decade learning how to do.

If the story ends there, though, we will have missed out on what it means to change medicine in a profound way.

Decades of progress in drug discovery and development have produced a renaissance of precision medicine in oncology, now spilling over into other therapeutic areas. Blunt-force treatment is giving way to biomarker-driven therapies matched to the biology of a patient's disease, and with them, hope for once-intractable conditions. The rate-limiting step, though, is getting them to the right patients. Advanced therapies need advanced diagnostics.

This is something that yesterday’s standard of care wasn't designed for. But I think Proscia has been really successful in building the infrastructure to get us there. Our partnerships with leading life sciences companies and network of digital labs are helping shorten the distance between discovery and diagnosis, generate point-of-diagnosis insights, and get the right patients on the right treatment. It’s the infrastructure that solves that hard, “last mile logistics” challenge critical for the clinical and commercial success of modern, global drug programs.

Looking forward, becoming the standard of care means that much of that infrastructure is starting to feel like plumbing - you just don’t think about it. “Digital pathology” will just be “pathology”. And “AI” will just be tests and workflows. And, maybe, if we’re successful in the limit, diseases like cancer will look like chronic conditions, or “cure,” in this context, won’t be taboo.

Getting there at the scale the world needs, and soon enough to matter, is a big, exciting challenge in front of us.

Why Agilent?

For Proscia's next chapter, we wanted a partner that understands pathology as deeply as we do, shares our ambition for where it can go, and has the scale and capabilities to help us realize it.

Agilent is obvious. The company brings deep scientific and clinical DNA, a culture of product excellence, and decades of trust built in quality-obsessed environments. Its footprint spans life sciences and diagnostics, with strong capabilities in pathology, advanced biomarkers and companion diagnostics, along with global reach, a broad installed base, and long-standing relationships across leading laboratories, health systems, and pharmaceutical companies. Proscia brings software speed, product velocity, and AI; Agilent brings the scale and scientific infrastructure to amplify it.

What mattered most to me and my cofounders, though, was the people and their values. Through our longstanding partnership with Agilent, we’ve gotten to know their team, leadership, and culture, which feels deeply compatible with our own: rigorous, ambitious, customer-focused, and committed to building great products with great teams. They share our conviction in where this market is going, and are putting their weight behind it.

To Our Community

Two things I’m most proud of are our customers and our team.

First, to our customers, there’s no greater honor than to play a supporting role in the big work you do. You’ve put your trust in us, which, in this market, is something we don’t take lightly. Building mission critical software (the kind you use 8 hours a day, with a patient on the other side of it) is a great responsibility. Over the years I’ve had the privilege of doing many, many lab tours, and my favorite part is popping my head into your pathologists' offices to see Concentriq up on your screen. “Your products have changed my life” makes us feel like it’s all worth it, and “where can I submit a feature request?" makes our products better - we hold both in equal regard.

I hope we've repaid that trust you put in us over the years with products that kept getting better and a team that had your back. Today, our partnership is backed by the scale and permanence of one of the most trusted names in life sciences and diagnostics, and it gets more durable. It also gets more interesting. Agilent's capabilities and ours fit together in ways that will shape the products you use, and we're excited to get started.

To all the Proscians: People know us as a technology company. And no doubt, Proscians are a smart, technical, and sometimes cerebral bunch. But we’re also a company that’s been built from the heart…an ethos I hope our community feels when working with our people and products. Underneath whatever the world admires about us – those authentically-Proscia  “beautiful and compelling experiences”– is a sense of purpose only we will understand, and a courage only you had.

I hope Proscia has been a place where you can do “life’s work” - the kind of work that has your fingerprints all over it, and adds up to something big. We’ve created a special, n-of-1 company. It couldn’t have happened with anyone else.

It still feels like we're just getting started. There’s a lot of work to do in this mission over the next decade. Now we get to do it with more firepower. 

Thank You, and A Personal Reflection

To all of Proscia’s investors, our board, and my CEO-mentors, thank you for placing your trust in me and my team – we would not have reached this milestone without you. Our early investors put a bet on some very unconventional founders with virtually no track record, and continued to double and triple down with patience and conviction. Our growth-stage investors put muscle behind Proscia, challenging ambition and excellence. 

Proscia was my first full time job. I had a lot to learn about leading a company, and I’m grateful to the real customers, real employees, and real people who put their money and their reputations behind me in those early days. The journey from founder to CEO was a thrill. I’ve felt more comfortable in the boardroom than the classroom, and I feel so fortunate to have had the freedom to build Proscia in a way that stayed true to our vision, with such inspiring people around me.

Job’s not finished.