Lockheed Martin invests $750,000 in DarwinAI

DarwinAI announced that it has received a $750,000 investment from Lockheed Martin under the Industrial Technological Benefits, or ITB, Policy. This investment enables DarwinAI, the explainable AI company located in Waterloo, Canada, to operationalize their COVID-Net initiative, which diagnoses COVID-19 using chest X-ray scans. Lockheed Martin's investment is a result of the ITB obligations associated with Canada's purchase and associated In-Service Support of 17 CC-130J Super Hercules aircraft, which were delivered to the Royal Canadian Air Force in 2010. DarwinAI released COVID-Net on March 22, in response to the severity of the pandemic. The team's decision to open source the project elicited a response from international researchers, several of whom leveraged the technology for local diagnostics. The initiative has evolved since then, most recently through COVIDNet-S, which can diagnose the severity of the disease by analyzing key visual indicators in an X-Ray scan. The resulting investment will enable the DarwinAI team to operationalize the project in a manner that makes it accessible to clinicians and healthcare professionals. Key milestones will include creating a front-end User Interface to simplify ease-of-use and integrating with PACS, the standard medical imaging technology used by hospitals.