Pictor Labs is a California-based artificial intelligence company founded in 2019 that applies image-to-image deep learning to digital pathology. Its technology performs computational virtual staining, converting unstained tissue, archived H&E slides and label-free images into virtual histological representations. Virtual stains are generated in minutes, and models are trained on expertly curated, co-registered image pairs. The company's work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications including Nature Communications, Nature Biomedical Engineering and Light: Science & Applications.
The product line comprises four virtual staining tools. ClearStain converts unstained tissue into virtual histological representations for laboratories and research teams working across the tissue lifecycle. DeepStain generates virtual H&E, immunohistochemistry-like and special stains from tissue images. ReStain allows specimens to be re-stained digitally, preserving them for downstream analysis. RetroStain is applied to archived H&E slides and label-free images.
Technical work spans artificial intelligence, histology image analysis and deployment across cloud and edge computing environments. The company offers flexible deployment: secure cloud infrastructure or on-premises within customer laboratories, including NVIDIA-powered edge hardware. It collaborates with academic medical centers and digital pathology platforms such as Proscia, Hamamatsu, the University of Maryland Medical Center and PathPresenter, with an emphasis on peer-reviewed research and multi-site evaluations.
Pictor Labs raised more than $18.8 million at launch, followed by a $30 million Series B. Its products serve clinical and anatomic pathology laboratories, life sciences research, spatial biology, genomics and sequencing, and academic medical centres. Virtual stains are labelled for research use only and are not cleared or approved for standalone clinical diagnostic use.
