Bengaluru-based medical technology company Morphle Labs has raised $5 million (₹approx. 42 crore) in a Series A round led by venture capital firm Inflexor Ventures, the company said on Tuesday. The funding will be used to expand manufacturing, strengthen regulatory approvals and hire engineering and research talent as it pursues customers in the United States and Europe.
Morphle builds robotic and imaging systems for histopathology, the discipline at the core of cancer diagnosis where microscopic examination of tissue is carried out to detect disease. Unlike radiology and blood diagnostics, histopathology continues to depend largely on manual processing of samples, a time-consuming workflow that laboratories worldwide have struggled to scale.
The company said the fresh capital will support global market expansion for its two main products — RoboTome, a robotic microtome that automates tissue slicing, and MorphoLens, a slide-scanning system that converts prepared tissue samples into digital images for remote interpretation by pathologists.
According to the company, RoboTome can cut biopsy blocks at more than twice the speed of a trained histotechnologist while maintaining consistent section quality, a key factor for diagnostic accuracy. MorphoLens, its complementary imaging platform, digitises more than 100 slides an hour using optical and computer-vision technology. Morphle says both systems automate two of the most bottleneck-prone tasks in cancer tissue analysis.
Global healthcare organisations have flagged persistent labour shortages in histopathology laboratories. Industry surveys cited by Morphle indicate that more than 60 per cent of laboratories worldwide report unfilled positions, leading to backlogs and delays in diagnostic reporting. The company is positioning its platform as a way to handle that increasing demand.
Commenting on the fundraise, Rohit Hiwale, founder and chief executive of Morphle Labs, said: “Our vision at Morphle is to rethink healthcare from the ground up. Histology remains one of the few critical domains still untouched by true automation, and that is where we have chosen to start. With RoboTome and MorphoLens, we have tackled two of the most challenging bottlenecks in diagnostics, high-throughput robotic microtomy and robust, modular slide imaging, but this is only the beginning.”
Inflexor Ventures partner Pratip Mazumdar said the investment reflects confidence in the company’s ability to build clinically reliable systems that combine robotics, imaging and artificial intelligence. Mazumdar added that early adoption by large laboratories in the United States and Europe demonstrates both market need and product readiness.
Morphle was founded in 2017 by Rohit Hiwale, Ashish Manmode and Sunnel Daniel and now employs about 100 people in Bengaluru and Boston. The company has filed more than 80 patents across robotics, optics, embedded systems and imaging. It plans to expand hiring across engineering, research and compliance as development continues.
With the new capital, Morphle expects to increase manufacturing capacity, pursue regulatory approvals required in global markets and extend its intellectual property portfolio. The company said it is building what it calls “physical AI”, referring to the combination of advanced hardware with intelligent software to automate clinically important physical tasks.
Beyond its current products, Morphle said it aims to create an integrated automation pipeline for the full tissue diagnostics workflow, from sample preparation to digital interpretation, with the goal of reducing turnaround time for cancer diagnosis.
