Every important industry has a meeting that looks ordinary from the hallway. In oncology, it is the tumor board: specialists gather around one case, compare what they know and agree on what happens next. The people are expert. The raw material is abundant. The snag is that neither expertise nor information arrives in a neat little stack.
Anju Mathew built a company around that snag. OncoLens, which she co-founded in Atlanta in 2017 with hematologist-oncologist Lijo Simpson, began by organizing the work surrounding those multidisciplinary discussions. Scheduling, case preparation, records, recommendations, follow-up and reporting sound like administrative nouns. Put them together, however, and they become the rails on which a consequential decision travels.
Mathew’s instinct was not to treat the meeting as a calendar event. She saw it as a system. That perspective makes sense once you read her career backward. She trained in industrial engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, started as a software engineer at IBM, worked at supply-chain software company i2 Technologies, earned an MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School and moved into management consulting. Code, operations, markets, organizations: the toolkit arrived in layers.
A résumé that behaves like a prototype
After Kellogg, Mathew spent three years at Kearney and then worked in strategic consulting at Thomson Reuters. In 2008 she co-founded LumaMed, a medical-device company focused on cancer imaging. It was her first startup and her first deep step into healthcare technology. She has said that the experience settled something for her: healthcare was where she wanted to stay.
Atlanta helped make that turn. Mathew arrived in the region around the end of 2008, when the economy was coming apart with theatrical efficiency. While looking for her next chapter, she attended a TiE event and met the people who became collaborators on LumaMed. Her account is a useful reminder that an ecosystem is not a skyline or a slogan. Sometimes it is simply the room where a future colleague happens to be standing.
After LumaMed, she joined McKesson. She started in corporate strategy and business development, then moved into the Medical-Surgical unit, where she led technology innovation and partnerships. It was a shift from advising organizations to shipping inside one. She could see how a national healthcare company assessed new tools, formed partnerships and made technology survive procurement, integration and daily use.
The sequence is more instructive than any one title. Mathew learned how to build software, explain a business, navigate a large company and work inside a regulated market before launching OncoLens. Founder-market fit can sound mystical, as if a calling descended through a beam of light. Hers looks more like an apprenticeship with invoices.
The product hid inside the handoffs
Simpson brought the clinical view. He knew both the value of multidisciplinary discussion and the burden of making it happen. Mathew brought the technologist’s habit of tracing the flow: where information begins, where it pauses, who needs it and what proof the system must retain. Their shared target was not a lack of intelligence. It was the friction between intelligent people.
OncoLens first concentrated on tumor-board and cancer-conference management, consolidating case material and supporting the discussion around it. The platform expanded into clinical decision support, care-pathway management, accreditation reporting, research workflows and the integration of structured and unstructured data. Artificial intelligence entered as a practical worker: extracting information, identifying cohorts and helping flag people who may fit trials or need attention from a service line.
A collaboration network, by the public numbers
This is the less cinematic side of AI, which may be why it is useful. The company is not asking a robot to hold the meeting. It is trying to make the relevant record visible before the room needs it and the agreed action legible afterward. In enterprise software, the glamorous demo lasts five minutes. The handoff has to work on Tuesday.
Capital follows the widening circle
OncoLens announced a $7.25 million Series A in 2021. The round brought together BIP Capital, Martin Ventures and SeedToB Capital, and Mathew framed the money in terms of product development and market expansion. Three years later, the circle widened again. In October 2024 the company closed a $16 million Series B co-led by BIP Capital and Cross Border Impact Ventures, with Martin Ventures and SeedToB returning.
The company’s public milestones show a familiar but difficult enterprise pattern: enter through a defined workflow, earn trust, connect more data and then take on adjacent jobs. By 2024, OncoLens was describing its business through three pillars - multidisciplinary collaboration, data interoperability and AI-driven informatics. The vocabulary grew because the product’s surface area did.
Mathew has also occupied the investor’s chair. She was active with Atlanta Technology Angels from 2015 to 2018 and served on the board of illuma Care Connections. Those roles matter less as ornaments than as changes in camera angle. A founder sees capital as runway. An angel must see a portfolio of uncertainties. A director has to ask whether enthusiasm can become governance.
Courage, with an operating manual
Recognition followed the company-building. Mathew was selected as a Women in Technology Woman in Science finalist in 2021 and again in 2023. She was named among the Top 100 Northwestern Alumni in Technology, received Georgia Titan 100 recognition across multiple years and was connected to Technology Association of Georgia honors for impact and innovation. Her research work has also appeared in professional oncology forums, including a 2023 ASCO abstract on biomarker-testing practices.
When Women in Technology asked what she would tell her younger self, her answer was compact: “Be Brave, Find your Passion and GO FOR IT!” The capitals make it sound like advice taped above a desk. Her career gives the sentence a more interesting texture. The bravery was not a blind jump. It was moving from technical work to advisory work, from a startup to a corporation and back to a startup, carrying each lesson forward.
Her public language about teams is similarly direct. After an OncoLens gathering in Atlanta in 2022, she wrote that she was proud of the “family” the company had built and named its culture as “Care, Innovation and Determination.” These are tidy nouns; companies live or die in the verbs underneath them. Who answers the difficult customer call? Who changes the product after a workflow proves stranger than the diagram? Who stays with an integration when the novelty has packed its bags?
That emphasis on collaboration also appears in how Mathew talks about customers. Announcing the 2024 financing, she described the preceding years as a partnership with provider and life-sciences organizations. It is a revealing choice of word. Hospital software cannot simply be dropped at the door with a password and a cheerful PDF. Its makers have to learn local processes, data boundaries and professional responsibilities, while the customer has to trust that the tool will respect all three. The sale may begin the relationship; implementation supplies the education.
The same pattern explains why OncoLens’ platform became broader without abandoning its original premise. A well-run discussion exposes the missing data. The missing data exposes the need for integration. Integration makes analytics possible. Analytics can then help a team decide where to look sooner. Each layer follows the work instead of floating above it. It is product expansion by adjacency, the enterprise equivalent of opening the next door only after learning the room you are in.
Mathew’s engineering and consulting backgrounds meet precisely at that junction. Engineering asks whether the system functions. Consulting asks whether an organization can change around it. The founder has to answer both, plus a less elegant third question: will anyone pay enough, soon enough, for the company to continue? OncoLens’ successive funding rounds do not settle those questions forever. They show that the company earned another interval in which to answer them at a larger scale.
Recent work keeps pushing that logic outward. Mathew has highlighted OncoLens’ collaboration with The Jackson Laboratory to extend expert-led genomic tumor boards to community cancer centers. In 2026, the company announced that research co-authored by Mathew on balancing cost and accuracy in large-scale biomarker extraction with large language models had been selected for presentation at EURAICA. The technical frontier is moving, but the organizing question remains recognizable: how can more useful information reach the right team in time?
There is an appealing neatness to the fact that an industrial engineer ended up here. Industrial engineering studies systems, constraints, queues and the stubborn distance between a process on paper and a process in motion. A tumor board is all of those things, except the stakes make every lost handoff heavier.
Mathew’s story is therefore less about a sudden idea than a practiced way of looking. First, notice the crowded table. Then notice what everyone had to do before they sat down and what must happen after they leave. Build for that whole sequence. The meeting may last an hour. The system is the company.