TileBio secures £1.6M investment to launch AI ‘language of cancer’ diagnostic technology

Glasgow, 16th February 2026

TileBio, a University of Glasgow spin-out developing self-learning artificial intelligence for digital pathology, has raised £1.6 million in seed funding to accelerate the development of its tissue-language foundation model.

The round was led by Twin Path Ventures, a UK-based venture capital firm focused on backing early-stage deep technology companies, with participation from Scottish Enterprise, Scotland’s national economic development agency, and the University of Glasgow.
The funding will be used to expand TileBio’s technical team, scale its foundation model training, and establish early clinical, life sciences and pharmaceutical partnerships.

TileBio is developing a new class of AI model for biology that learns directly from routine medical images without requiring human-labelled data. By learning a structured representation of tissue morphology using a proprietary visual language of pathology, the platform enables consistent, scalable analysis of medical images, supporting clinical triage, biomarker discovery, and drug development.
A central component of TileBio’s work is its data partnership with the NHS West of Scotland Innovation Hub and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, one of the UK’s largest health boards. Through this collaboration, TileBio will train and validate its foundation model on millions of digitised pathology images, using no patient-identifiable data in model training. This enables ethical, population-scale research that will benefit patients in Scotland and beyond, while maintaining strict governance and privacy controls.

Christopher Walsh, CEO of TileBio, said:

“Pathology underpins most cancer diagnoses, yet the analytical tools available to clinicians have not fundamentally changed in decades. Training self-learning foundation models directly on real-world clinical data allows us to build systems that understand tissue at scale without human bias, support clinical decision making, and that will open new opportunities in disease research and drug development.”
Katie Lockwood, partner at Twin Path Ventures, said: “At Twin Path, we are looking for visionary founders, technical excellence and data supremacy. We believe we have found just that in TileBio. Their models completely bypass the industry’s biggest bottleneck: the need for manual data annotation, as well as being able to generalise across cancer types and subtypes.

“By combining a novel self-learning tissue language model with world-class clinical data from the NHS, Chris and his team are setting a new technical benchmark for what computational pathology can achieve. We are thrilled to lead this seed round and support their mission to turn raw medical images into life-saving clinical insights.”

Derek Shaw, Director of Entrepreneurship and Investment at Scottish Enterprise, said: “This investment underscores our commitment to using our world-class innovation capabilities to increase the number of ambitious companies scaling up in Scotland, helping them create quality, high-value jobs and compete and lead in international markets.

“There are several industries of the future where Scotland has global strengths, including Human Health, and building on that through support for companies such as TileBio is crucial to their continued growth.”

Uzma Khan, Vice Principal, Economic Development and Innovation, University of Glasgow, said: "We are incredibly proud of the TileBio team in successfully achieving their first raise. Their success is a powerful endorsement of the scientific excellence behind the venture combined with a leap forward in using AI models.
“It is also evidence of the level of entrepreneurial ambition emerging from the University of Glasgow. We have been delighted to support TileBio in their commercialisation journey through our de-risking funds and venture builder programmes such as the MedTech Innovation Fund and the Infinity G accelerator.

“The University looks forward to supporting their continued growth and success as they take this important next step.”
The seed funding positions TileBio to advance its foundation model toward clinical use cases and to expand its platform for pharmaceutical and biotechnology research.

The seed funding positions TileBio to advance its foundation model toward clinical use cases and to expand its platform for pharmaceutical and biotechnology research. Learn more at https://tilebio.com.