Based in Switzerland, the company's technology has been used by more than 100 hospitals in Europe to support the diagnosis of 25,000 cancer patients since it launched in April 2014, Lynch said, and patient numbers are growing at 400 percent a year.

He said the cost of sequencing DNA had fallen from millions of dollars a few years ago to a couple of hundred dollars today, and Sophia had developed algorithms to analyze the data.

"It gives you a much better idea of which drugs are going to work and how you stop the cancer coming back," Lynch said.

Lynch, who founded and led software firm Autonomy before it was sold to Hewlett Packard in 2011 in a deal that soured a year later, first invested in Sophia through his Invoke Capital venture capital fund about 18 months ago.

(Reporting by Paul Sandle, editing by David Evans)

Valeurs citées dans l'article : APRIL, HIS, FIRM, SOFTWARE, Autonomy Corporation plc