Vara

Vara builds AI for breast cancer screening. Our software supports roughly 50% of Germany’s national screening programme, processing over 150,000 mammograms every month. We’ve published in Nature Medicine and The Lancet Digital Health, among others, and our AI holds the only CE mark for independent second reading in mammography.

That work generates a particular kind of knowledge — the kind that comes from operating AI at population scale, in live clinical workflows, for years. What happens when a screening site installs new hardware. How radiologists actually interact with AI recommendations. What breaks quietly in an IT system and how you catch it before it reaches a patient.

Most of this stays inside the company. Internal dashboards, engineering retrospectives, conversations with screening programme leaders. The idea for this Substack is to share what we can — clearly, without hype, and grounded in what we’ve actually observed.

You’ll find research explained in plain language, lessons from real-world deployment, and our perspective on where AI in breast screening is heading. We write for radiologists, screening programme leaders, regulators, and anyone following how AI is being integrated into healthcare — not in theory, but in practice.

Vara was founded in 2018 in Berlin by Jonas Muff (CEO) and Stefan Bunk (CTO).