Company leader
Jonas Muff
Co-founder and CEO
Vara
Jonas Muff is the co-founder and chief executive of Vara, a Berlin company whose AI helps radiologists read screening mammograms. Vara's software runs in more than half of the units in Germany's national breast cancer screening program.
A Doctor's Son in Switzerland
He was born and raised in Switzerland, the son of a doctor. From that upbringing he took the belief that "healthcare's power and potential lies in prevention rather than just cure", and he came to see AI as a way to make good diagnostics cheaper and less dependent on scarce experts.
He studied business at the University of St. Gallen. Soon after, he grew START, a student conference on entrepreneurship, to more than 2,000 participants.
Venture Building at Merantix
In February 2017 he joined Merantix, a Berlin venture studio for AI companies, as head of business development, and he led the build-up of its first ventures. He and Stefan Bunk started on the same day as two of its first employees.
Vara began there as a project in 2018. He and Bunk assembled machine learning experts, software developers, product designers and radiologists and set out "to reimagine the breast cancer screening workflow from the bottom up".
Leading Vara
He compares a screening radiologist's work to looking for "a needle in a haystack", since the large majority of mammograms show no cancer. Vara's Decision Referral Pathway lets the AI label only the exams it is confident about, sets a safety net for highly suspicious cases, and leaves the rest to radiologists.
He has framed Vara's mission in global terms, noting that about 70% of breast cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, where screening is scarce. "We believe every woman has the right to screening", he said, and Vara has opened screening work in Mexico, Greece and India.