Participants in the Montreal-based company’s latest round include DigitalDx Ventures, Boehringer Ingelheim’s venture capital fund, Desjardins Capital and other investors. (Fierce Biotech)

Talking point: Optina is developing technology to detect signs of Alzheimer’s using eye scans, which would dramatically change how the disease is currently diagnosed. Because there is no clear test for Alzheimer’s, doctors sometimes have to spend months or years ruling out other conditions, according to Fierce Biotech. Optina’s technology uses a hyperspectral camera and machine learning to analyze nerve signals at the back of the eye, which send information to the brain for image processing. The Series A comes a week after another Montreal-based biotech company, Repare Therapeutics, raised nearly US$100 million in a share offering on the Nasdaq.