When the future of ophthalmology starts reading like a data scientist’s fever dream and a clinical trial coordinator’s fantasy checklist, you know something real just happened. Amaros Inc., the stealth-smart, Silicon Valley startup whispering to the soul of ophthalmic care, just closed its Series A round. The amount? Undisclosed. The implications? Loud enough to echo through every retinal practice and pharma boardroom from Atherton to Basel.
Founded in 2019 by Vartan Ghazarossian, Ph.D. and Ben Toker, two names that carry weight in both lab coats and startup circles, Amaros is doing something most health tech companies claim but rarely deliver: real-time, AI-powered, no-hassle, precision intelligence built only for eyes. Not cardiology. Not “we’re expanding into vision.” Just eyes. Laser-focused, pun very much intended.
Their flagship platform, EvidenceEngine, doesn’t just analyze data, it turns clinical chaos into order. 300 million+ images, 220 biomarkers, 12 imaging modalities. That’s not your uncle’s EMR system; that’s a machine learning backbone serving up insights with five times more identification and faster trial recruitment than traditional methods. It’s not clinical software; it’s ophthalmic intelligence with swagger, no software installs, no disruption to workflows, and reports that show up faster than a red-eye out of SFO.
Behind the curtain, you’ve got a deep bench. CTO Davit Shahnazaryan is stitching together multimodal AI pipelines like he’s programming in 4D. CFO Tom Hoster (Princeton and Stanford in the same sentence? Come on.) brings four decades of financial maneuvering. Dr. Mark Packer is the CMO, and if his name rings bells, it’s because he’s been running trials before most people could spell “biomarker.” Then there’s Lee Kramm, M.D., MSE, steering regulatory like a surgeon through stormy FDA waters.
But the real flex? The advisory board. David S. Boyer, Peter K. Kaiser, T.Y. Alvin Liu, these aren’t advisors; they’re the Justice League of retinal research. Add Sumit Shah, Michael Singer, David Eichenbaum, and Vance Thompson, and you’ve got a squad that could practically rewrite the textbooks on ophthalmic innovation.
And while other companies are still hosting webinars about “leveraging AI,” Amaros is scaling teams across engineering, clinical ops, and data science globally, because the demand’s already there. The global AI in ophthalmology market is on a 36.79% CAGR tear to hit $1.36B by 2030, and Amaros is building the on-ramp. Clinics get smarter. Trials move faster. Life sciences teams get clarity instead of spreadsheets.
This isn’t about disrupting an industry; it’s about reorganizing how eye care thinks, moves, and acts. Vartan Ghazarossian and Ben Toker didn’t just build tech; they built vision.
