Mindpeak: An EIC Accelerator Story of AI That Reads Cancer Slides

A pathologist scoring a breast cancer biopsy counts stained cells under a microscope and estimates what share of them carry a marker such as Ki-67 or HER2. Two pathologists looking at the same slide often disagree, and the number decides which drug the patient gets. Mindpeak, a Hamburg company founded in 2018, sells software that does the counting on a scanned slide in seconds and leaves the final call to the pathologist.

In the European Innovation Council's March 2020 round, Mindpeak was one of the grant-only winners of the EIC Accelerator pilot, listed as MindPeak GmbH with the project AIPACA in the Commission's list of selected companies, with no partner company named. The EU paid €1,372,378 towards a €1,960,540 project. Six years on, the company is selling through two of the largest makers of digital pathology equipment and counts the EIC Fund among its shareholders.

What Mindpeak Does Today

Mindpeak is active. In September 2026 it announced that BSI, a notified body, had certified its quality management system under the EU In Vitro Diagnostic Regulation (IVDR) and ISO 13485. Ten days later it announced a co-selling partnership with Revolune, a maker of multiplex staining kits, and in July it was named a founding member of CellCarta's Digital Pathology and AI Consortium. The commercial register shows accounts filed up to the 2024 financial year, published on 17 February 2026, and Felix Faber as sole managing director, according to North Data.

The business now has two halves. For hospital and private laboratories, Mindpeak sells scoring suites for breast cancer, PD-L1 across tumour types and HER2. For drug companies, it sells image analysis for clinical trials and biomarker research under names such as PhenoScout and peakPredict. Its company page claims 11 CE-IVD products, and its product page marks Ki-67, ER and PR in breast tissue and PD-L1 in lung as CE-marked, with many other algorithms for research use only.

The Technology: Counting Cells, Not Estimating Them

Immunohistochemistry (IHC) stains a tissue section with antibodies so that cells carrying a biomarker turn brown. For breast cancer, the share of cells positive for Ki-67, the oestrogen receptor (ER), the progesterone receptor (PR) and HER2 guides grading and treatment. Pathologists usually estimate these shares by eye in a few fields of view. Mindpeak's software detects and classifies every cell on the scanned slide, separates tumour cells from normal and immune cells, and returns a score that the pathologist can accept, correct or reject, according to the project report on CORDIS.

The claim that sets it apart is robustness: the report says the AI copes with the differences in staining and scanners between laboratories and works with the scanners of all major vendors. Felix Faber told the EU's CORDIS results service that a large variability study showed "non-inferiority for human readers with AI vs readers working alone" regardless of stainers, scanners and biomarkers. That is a study run by the company; the article does not name an independent replication.

What AIPACA Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

AIPACA ran from 1 August 2020 to 31 July 2022, with the grant agreement signed on 3 July 2020. The objective was broad: AI software that analyses biopsy slides within seconds, finds tumour regions and quantifies tumour markers, and EIC money for "a successful and fast go-to-market". It set no numeric sales or approval targets. The second periodic report covers the period to 31 July 2022, so the project closed on its planned date.

1. AI that finds tumour regions and quantifies biomarkersDeliveredKi-67, ER, PR and HER2 scoring in breast tissue, per the CORDIS report; the same four biomarkers are offered in the Paige integration of March 2023.
2. Clinical approval for routine useDeliveredCE-IVD marks for the four breast biomarkers reported to CORDIS; Ki-67, ER and PR are still listed as CE-marked on the product page. Breast HER2 is now listed as research use, with only a region-of-interest variant CE-IVD marked.
3. User interface for pathologists (AI Console)DeliveredDeveloped in AIPACA, CE-validated and usability-tested, per the CORDIS report and results article.
4. Fast go-to-marketDeliveredProducts in routine use at customers by project end, per CORDIS; distribution through Paige (2023), Roche (2024), Epredia and Leica Biosystems (2026).

On the record, AIPACA did what it set out to do, on time. The caveat is that the goals were written loosely enough that they were hard to miss, and that the clinical evidence for accuracy comes from Mindpeak's own validation studies.

What Mindpeak Has Achieved Since the Award

The money came in two steps. Before the EIC award, Mindpeak raised a $3 million seed round in September 2019, led by Innovationsstarter Fonds Hamburg with Apex Ventures, Nina Capital, Motu Ventures and angel investors. Geratherm Medical AG, a German medical device maker, appears as a shareholder from May 2020 in the register filings shown by North Data, and still names MindPeak GmbH among its holdings in its 2025 annual report.

On 30 September 2024 Mindpeak announced a $15.3 million Series A co-led by ZEISS Ventures and InnoVentureFund, with AI.FUND and the European Innovation Council Fund taking part, as also reported by Startup City Hamburg and the law firm GÖRG, which advised AI.FUND. The register shows share capital rising from €47,507 to €72,374 in October 2024, the largest of the company's capital increases.

The sales channels followed. In March 2023 Mindpeak and Paige put Mindpeak's IHC algorithms into the Paige platform. In September 2024 its algorithms were added to Roche's navify Digital Pathology open environment. In February 2026 Epredia, part of Japan's PHC Group, signed an EU distribution agreement covering both CE-marked and research-use modules. In March 2026 Leica Biosystems, a Danaher company, signed a global reseller agreement for nine AI applications in its Aperio ecosystem, labelled for research use only, as Mindpeak also announced. The same month Discovery Life Sciences, a laboratory services firm for clinical trials, partnered with Mindpeak for biomarker testing in drug trials, and in December 2025 the antibody-drug conjugate developer Tubulis announced a collaboration.

Use has grown by the company's own count: 10,000 patients diagnosed with its AI in the Paige release of March 2023, more than 30,000 in the Series A release of September 2024. No laboratory or regulator has published a matching figure.

The Money and the Gaps

Mindpeak has also kept winning smaller public grants. North Data lists German federal research grants for the projects MAI (€495,021, 2019), ELBSTRAND (€475,697, 2022), SUPERB (€662,109, 2023), Gen4X (€459,152, 2025) and BIO-SPARK (€837,200, 2026), plus €609,484 of Hamburg state aid under the PROFI programme in 2023. SUPERB, on AI to predict immunotherapy response in triple-negative breast cancer, also appears among the company's publications. AIPACA was the largest single grant. CORDIS lists no other EU project for the company.

What the record does not show is the size of the business. As a small German GmbH, Mindpeak files abbreviated accounts; its revenue, losses and headcount are not visible in free register data, and the company has not published them. The investors' releases describe it as a market leader, which this article could not verify.

The United States is the other gap. In the Series A release Mindpeak said its algorithms were among the first used in routine diagnostics in the US and the EU, but the FDA's 510(k) database returns no clearance under the Mindpeak name, and Faber described US use as "for research purposes" to CORDIS in 2022. The Leica deal of 2026 is for research-use products. Which US laboratories use the software in patient care, and on what regulatory basis, is not public, although Mindpeak names Intermountain Health and BioReference among its partners on its website.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU has put cancer diagnosis and AI regulation near the top of its health agenda. Europe's Beating Cancer Plan commits €4 billion across prevention, early detection, diagnosis and treatment. The IVDR, applicable since 26 May 2022, raised the bar for diagnostic software, and the AI Act treats AI in regulated medical products as high-risk, with those obligations applying from 2 August 2028. A European company that has already been certified under the IVDR, and keeps its software running without cloud connectivity, as Epredia describes it, fits that framework better than many US rivals.

The commercial picture is less European. Mindpeak's largest distribution partners are Leica Biosystems, owned by the US group Danaher, Roche from Switzerland and Epredia, owned by Japan's PHC Group. That is a normal route for a software start-up, but it means the European value sits in the algorithms and the regulatory work, not in the hardware or the sales channel.

The Verdict

Mindpeak has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.