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By Carrie Ghose – Senior reporter, Columbus Business First

An Ohio State University spinoff has raised $5 million after more than doubling customers since fall for its AI-powered software to help plan heart valve surgeries.

Dublin-based DASI Simulations LLC has signed 35 health systems to software subscriptions, including one of the country’s largest structural heart programs, co-founder and CEO Teri Sirset said. Another 50 prospects are in talks, including other players in the healthcare industry.

“I am thrilled with the growth,” Sirset told Columbus Business First. “I’ve been in sales a long time. I’ve never had such an exciting product that I haven’t had to chase physicians down to explain to them why they should use it.”

Instead, surgeons are evangelizing the technology to peers, she said.

“Why wouldn’t you use DASI Simulations in every case?” Dr. Thomas Waggoner, director of the structural heart program at Tucson Medical Center, said in a press release.

The software helps surgeons choose the replacement valve that best fits the patient’s anatomy and predict complications. In some cases it has allowed surgeries to go forward in cases otherwise deemed too risky.

Heart programs that started using the software for only high-risk cases have expanded to every aortic valve procedure, Sirset said.

“It is a continued validation that the technology, at some point in the near future, will be the standard of care,” she said.

Nonetheless, education is a necessary part of the sales process as hospitals grapple with adoption of AI, Sirset said.

Cedars Sinai Health Ventures, Georgia Tech Ventures, Columbus-based Accelerating Angels and individuals invested in the latest round, which will go toward hiring engineers and sales representatives.

Dasi has raised a cumulative $11.8 million in just over five years in business, and more than $1 million in grants. Accelerating Angels, focused on female founders, is a repeat investor.

The company has 25 full-time employees and 10 contractors, and expects about five hires this year. Most relocated to Central Ohio from states including California, Texas, New York and Florida, Sirset said.

“We’ve done a good job not just of selling the technology but selling what the state has to offer … and Columbus,” she said.

The company has received an additional patent approval as it expands the product line for surgical planning, co-founder and CTO Lakshmi Prasad Dasi said in the release.

The technology can apply to other types of heart valve replacements, and eventually more procedures, Sirset said.

“The north star of this company is anywhere a medical device interacts with human anatomy, we should be able to use AI to simulate that procedure,” she said. “The sky’s the limit.”

DASI’s first software received FDA clearance as a medical device in May 2023. Sales took off after Medicare approved reimbursement in January 2024.

The company spun out of Ohio State University in December 2019, and in early 2022 launched a pilot with two customers including OSU Wexner Medical Center. Dasi, a biomedical engineer and the product’s inventor, left OSU for a joint appointment at Georgia Tech and Emory University in Atlanta in late 2021.