Healthcare services · Digital pathology

HistoWiz

A Brooklyn histology lab that turned its own order book into a searchable archive of digital slides. Now a GLP contract pathology provider with a granted patent, named pharma clients and, since 2016, nothing in the securities record.

Nights on the microtome

The founding story starts with a chore. As a graduate student, Ke Cheng spent late nights cutting tissue and making slides, the slow manual work between an experiment and a result. At the time, she told O’Reilly Media in 2017, it took two or more weeks to get slides back from a service lab.

So she made a promise she had to keep herself. HistoWiz drew its first customers by offering a three day turnaround against that two week standard. She went door to door in her old research buildings offering a free trial, and processed the samples at night on core facility equipment.

That is a service business. The part that made it a technology company came next.

The data nobody could reach

Histology is physical. A tissue sample is fixed, embedded in paraffin, sliced by a microtome into sections about five microns thick, mounted on glass and stained. The common stain, hematoxylin and eosin, colors cytoplasm pink and nuclei purple, and that alone can reveal disease.

The result of all that work is a glass slide in a box in a drawer. Cheng noticed what that meant: a large body of histopathology data existed and could not be shared, because it sat siloed in slide boxes. Even in published papers, only small representative crops of a slide ever appear. She had watched genomics go the other way, toward searchable databases anyone could contribute to and query.

So HistoWiz scanned every slide it made. Customers got a high resolution image of the whole slide, viewable at up to 40x on a laptop or a phone, and a discount if they let the image join the database. By 2017 that archive, PathologyMap, held more than 30,000 slides and was growing more than 200 percent a year, mostly mouse tissue, with human, rat, rabbit and zebrafish material alongside.

The customers arrive

Four years in, the client list already ran through Harvard, MD Anderson and HHMI on the academic side and Pfizer, Regeneron and Novo Nordisk on the industry side. By 2021 the company said it had served over 1000 customers.

Then the pandemic did something unusual for a wet lab. “We were one of the only labs that remained operational in New York during that period” is how Akash Parvatikar, who joined as AI scientist and product manager in 2022, put it. The company worked on vaccine research in that stretch, and the money followed.

Money, then an operator

On October 19, 2021, HistoWiz announced a $32 million Series A led by Vivo Capital, with venBio, Asahi Kasei and Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer joining. The plan was a flagship lab with tissue sectioning and embedding robots.

A year later the founder handed over the operating job. On October 25, 2022, Linh Hoang, MD, PhD, previously CEO of Weavr Health and a general manager at PerkinElmer and Thermo Fisher, became chief executive and a director. Cheng moved to president and stayed on the board.

What followed reads like a contract research organization growing up. March 2023: a 10,197 square foot central lab inside the Alexandria Center for Life Science in Long Island City, on top of the Brooklyn and Miami sites. June 2023: a scanning partnership with Pramana. May 2024: GLP compliant histology and immunohistochemistry, aimed at customers heading into pre-IND and FDA submission work. June 2024: PathologyMap 2.0, with one click AI analysis and third party models from Aiosyn and AIRA Matrix. And in February 2024 the patent office granted the company a patent on the tagging model it had published as research five years earlier.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the technology claim is the best documented part. A patent issued, the method was peer reviewed, and outside pharmaceutical companies are named in reporting the company did not pay for. The scale claims are the weakest. Four customer counts circulate, two citation counts circulate, and no revenue figure has been published since a board member said in 2022 that it had nearly doubled. The trail also goes quiet: the last item on the company news page is the Protege partnership of March 2025.

What to watch

• Any Form D or announced round after the 2021 Series A. Five years is a long gap for a capital intensive lab business.
• Whether the GLP business converts into named toxicology or IND enabling programs, where preclinical pathology revenue concentrates.
• The second application in the same patent family, published but not yet granted.
• A reconciled customer count and citation count. Both are currently reported several ways.

In their words

Related companies

• HappiLabs: Also in Healthcare Services. A Chicago service that put PhD scientists to work negotiating lab supply prices for other scientists, built on $20,000 from friends and family in 2012 and acquired by
• Science Exchange: Also in Healthcare Services. A marketplace for ordering experiments that became procurement software for big pharma, and that sourced the laboratories for the largest public test of whether
• In Your Corner: Also in Healthcare Services. An online counseling and coaching marketplace that began as Pretty Padded Room in 2011, went through Y Combinator in 2014, and closed in 2016
• Triomics: Also in Healthcare Services. An oncology-tuned language model that reads the whole cancer chart and hands research coordinators a cited worklist before clinic opens

Sources

1. Public recordForm D, Histowiz, Inc., CIK 0001635476SEC · Mar 4, 2015
2. Public recordForm D, Histowiz, Inc., CIK 0001635476SEC · Jun 7, 2016
3. Public recordUS Patent 11,900,703, Systems and methods for automated tagging of digital histology slidesUSPTO · issued Feb 13, 2024
4. Public recordPubMed affiliation search for HistoWiz, 7 indexed papersNational Library of Medicine · Sep 2026
5. IndependentCancer detection, one slice at a timeO’Reilly Media, Courtney Webster · Aug 9, 2017
6. IndependentOne scientist’s quest to teach machines to see cancer the way doctors doDrug Discovery and Development, Brian Buntz · Nov 11, 2024
7. IndependentHistoWiz Raises $32M in Series A FinancingFinSMEs · Oct 20, 2021
8. IndependentHistoWiz, Top Pathology Services Company 2024Healthcare Business Review · 2024
9. InterviewHistoWiz: fast histology and an image database for mining from Brooklyn NY, with Ke ChengDigital Pathology Place podcast
10. CompanyHistoWiz Raises $32M Series A FinancingPR Newswire · Oct 19, 2021
11. CompanyHistoWiz Appoints Linh Hoang as CEO and Board MemberBusiness Wire · Oct 25, 2022
12. CompanyHistoWiz Expands Laboratory Footprint with New Headquarters in QueensBusiness Wire · Mar 20, 2023
13. CompanyHistoWiz Expands Histology and Pathology Service Offerings to Include GLPBusiness Wire · May 30, 2024
14. CompanyHistoWiz Launches AI-powered PathologyMap 2.0 for Histopathology Slide ImagesBusiness Wire · Jun 27, 2024
15. PartnerProtege and HistoWiz Partner to Digitize and Unlock Pathology Data for AI TrainingProtege · Mar 19, 2025
16. CompanyHistoWiz citations, team, clients, AI apps and news pageshistowiz.com · accessed Sep 23, 2026