Abbott is betting a quarter-billion dollars that the future of medical imaging lives somewhere between the strange world of quantum mechanics and the hospital basement where the MRI machines hum.
NVision Imaging Technologies, a nearly decade-old startup based in Ulm, Germany, disclosed a $55 million Series B round on May 13, with the diagnostics giant as its anchor investor. The financing—which includes a $17 million venture loan from the European Investment Bank—values NVision somewhere in the $250 million to $300 million range, according to reporting by Axios.
It's an audacious valuation for a company pursuing what amounts to two moonshots simultaneously: quantum-enhanced medical imaging and quantum computing for drug discovery. Whether that confidence is warranted may depend on how quickly hospitals embrace technology that sounds more at home in a physics lab than a radiology department.
With this Series B, NVision says it has now raised $120 million total since its founding in 2015. CEO Sella Brosh told Axios the company expects to begin raising a Series C—north of $100 million—sometime in 2026, though that timeline feels more aspirational than certain given how these things typically unfold.
The Quantum Bet on Medical Imaging
Brosh and CTO Ilai Schwartz launched NVision alongside three quantum physics professors with a deceptively simple premise: apply quantum physics principles to make MRI scans dramatically more sensitive. The result is POLARIS, a platform the company claims can amplify MRI sensitivity up to 100,000 times for certain metabolic signals, at least according to the company's own figures cited by Axios.
That's the kind of improvement that, if it holds up in widespread clinical use, could theoretically reveal metabolic processes invisible to conventional imaging. Cancer cells metabolize differently than healthy tissue—catch those differences early enough, and diagnostics shift from reactive to genuinely preventive.
But quantum-anything tends to come with caveats. The technology is notoriously finicky, expensive to maintain, and difficult to scale beyond controlled laboratory settings. NVision has installed systems at marquee research institutions—Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the University of Cambridge, Technical University of Munich—but according to company guidance, it is targeting approximately 20 sites globally by the end of 2026. That's hardly the pace of a technology ready for mass deployment.
Adding a Second Quantum Gamble
Perhaps more surprising than the imaging business is where NVision is heading next. Alongside the funding announcement, the company unveiled PIQC (Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuits), a quantum computing platform designed for drug discovery. Unlike the superconducting qubits favored by IBM or Google, NVision's approach uses organic molecule-based qubits integrated onto photonic chips.
The pitch is elegant, if untested at scale: use quantum computing to design drug candidates, then validate them rapidly using POLARIS imaging. It's vertical integration in an industry that rarely achieves it—bridging computational prediction with in-vivo testing in a single corporate entity.
Whether that integration offers a real advantage or just doubles the technical risk is an open question. Quantum computing for drug discovery remains largely theoretical, with companies like IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave still fighting to prove commercial viability in any domain.
Abbott's Strategic Calculus
Abbott was the sole strategic diagnostics investor in the round, joined by Playground Global, Matterwave/b2venture, and Entrée Capital. Multiple outlets also reported participation from CDP Venture Capital, though the firm was not explicitly confirmed in NVision's own press release—a curious discrepancy that neither party has publicly clarified.
For Abbott, the investment represents a hedge on next-generation diagnostics. The company has built its reputation on accessible, scalable medical devices. NVision's technology is neither, at least not yet. But if quantum imaging proves transformative, Abbott gains an early foothold in a market that could eventually dwarf today's diagnostic tools.
The timing aligns with a robust medtech funding environment. JPMorgan and DealForma data cited by Axios showed that 31% of the 79 medtech rounds in Q1 2026 exceeded $50 million—a rare moment of exuberance in a sector that's often capital-starved.
The Path Ahead
NVision now employs nearly 150 people from over 30 nationalities, according to a recent company job posting, a figure consistent with LinkedIn's range of 51–200 employees. That international roster reflects both Germany's quantum research ecosystem and the specialized talent required to build quantum hardware.
The company secured roughly $30 million in its 2023 Series A, led by Playground Global, supplemented by approximately $19.5 million in German government funding. In March, NVision announced a strategic hub at Cambridge and landed a grant from Innovation Fund Denmark in partnership with Aarhus University.
Whether the grand convergence of quantum computing and quantum imaging materializes as planned—or whether NVision becomes a cautionary tale of overreach—will likely take years to resolve. For now, the company has the capital and the institutional backing to find out.
And Abbott, notably, has decided the odds are worth taking.
