The robot behind the biopsy. Clarapath automates the paper-thin cut that begins nearly every cancer diagnosis.
Before a pathologist reads a biopsy, someone has to shave the tissue into slices thinner than a human hair, float them onto glass, and stain them. For roughly 150 years, that work has been done by hand - one block at a time, by a shrinking pool of highly trained technicians. Clarapath, a medical-robotics company based in Hawthorne, New York, built a machine to do it instead.
Its flagship system, SectionStar, is a fully automated tissue-sectioning and transfer platform. It combines precision robotics, machine vision and AI to cut sections at a user-defined 3 to 10 microns, mount them onto slides, and record quality-control data on every one. A single session handles roughly 72 tissue blocks and 200 slides, and the system is designed to run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The goal is not novelty for its own sake. Pathology labs face rising caseloads and a persistent shortage of skilled histotechnologists. Manual sectioning is variable, tiring and hard to staff. Clarapath's bet is that standardizing that first physical step improves everything downstream - slide quality, turnaround time and, ultimately, the reliability of a diagnosis.
“Our strategic investors share in our mission to overhaul this critical aspect of patient care that has long been overlooked.”
Fully automated, all-in-one robotic microtomy system. Cuts 3-10 micron sections, transfers them via a patented tape method that avoids waterbath artifacts, and captures quantitative quality metrics - roughly 72 blocks and 200 slides per session, around the clock.
Lets a technician run SectionStar tissue sectioning from another city or country. When skilled labor is scarce, the work moves to the people instead of the other way around.
AI-powered digital-pathology and slide-management software gained through the Crosscope acquisition. Provides workflow tools and machine-learning decision support, connecting Clarapath's hardware to digital diagnosis.
A companion tissue-preparation product plus professional consulting services that help labs plan and adopt automation across their histology workflow.
Digital pathology has attracted plenty of attention, and companies like Paige and PathAI have built software to help read slides. Large incumbents - Leica Biosystems, Sakura Finetek, Roche Tissue Diagnostics - supply much of the equipment around the histology lab. What most of them leave alone is the physical act of sectioning: the manual, artful step of cutting and mounting tissue.
That is precisely where Clarapath planted itself. Rather than build another algorithm to interpret an image, it automated the making of the image's source - the slide itself. Its tape-transfer method sidesteps the traditional waterbath, a common source of floating artifacts, and its machine vision turns each cut into measurable, trackable data. The 2023 acquisition of Crosscope then connected that automated hardware to AI-assisted diagnosis, giving Clarapath a rare span across the bench and the screen.
Clarapath sells and places SectionStar systems into pathology labs, supported by service, tape-transfer consumables, software and consulting - capital equipment paired with recurring revenue. The Crosscope software adds room for subscription income on top of the hardware. Its expertise sits at an unusual intersection: precision mechanical engineering, machine vision, computational AI and hands-on histology workflow, with US-based manufacturing and service. The company's scientific DNA traces back to high-throughput neuroanatomy research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where the tape-transfer approach was refined to process hundreds of thousands of tissue samples.
Clarapath spins out of Dr. Partha Mitra's high-throughput neuroanatomy work using tape-transfer microtomy.
The company raises $32M in additional funding to advance its medical-robotics platform.
Clarapath passes its first round of certifications and expands its global headquarters in Hawthorne, NY.
Clarapath buys AI digital-pathology firm Crosscope, retaining its Mountain View and Mumbai teams.
Announces a strategic collaboration with Mayo Clinic and closes a $36M round led by Northwell Ventures, reaching ~$75M total.
Compiled from public sources including Clarapath, The Robot Report, BusinessWire, Dark Daily, FinSMEs and GlobeNewswire. Figures such as funding totals and revenue are approximate and reflect the most recent public reporting available. Details may have changed since publication.