Transformative, an Estonian-founded healthcare start-up whose software predicts sudden cardiac arrest, announced today that it has raised a 1.7 million-US dollar seed round, led by Estonia’s Tera Ventures. The round includes funding from the Wellcome Trust, which provided Transformative a Healthcare Innovator Award, and from InHealth Ventures, which had previously invested in Transformative’s pre-seed round. Investors Andrus Oks of Tera Ventures and Nick Slater of AI Seed are joining Transformative’s board.
Transformative’s first patented technology predicts sudden cardiac arrest by analysing data from patient monitoring devices that are standard in hospitals. Transformative, which operates in the US, UK and Estonia, will use its seed funding to obtain FDA clearance for its first product and to begin developing technologies that predict other life-threatening conditions, according to Josh Oppenheimer, MD, MBA, the company’s co-founder and CEO and a practicing emergency medicine physician.
“On each shift, I experience the tragedy of delayed care and the marvel of early, preventive interventions,” says Oppenheimer. “AI-augmented patient monitoring detects subtle changes preceding patient deterioration that are invisible to physicians, allowing us to be in the right place at the right time and save more lives.”
More than 292,000 adults and 7,000 children suffer cardiac arrest in US hospitals each year, with only 25 per cent surviving to hospital discharge, according to a 2019 estimate by the American Heart Association. Globally, six million people die from sudden cardiac arrest annually. The American Heart Association recommends early intervention – which Transformative’s technology enables – as the centerpiece of its guidelines on improving cardiac arrest care.
Jack Lewin, MD, the chairman of the National Coalition on Health Care, the former CEO of the American College of Cardiology, and an advisor to Transformative, notes that many patients who survive in-hospital cardiac arrest suffer serious cognitive deficits due to delayed care.
“While this is disheartening, there is new hope. Transformative has developed amazing and disruptive technology capable of predicting sudden cardiac arrest minutes to hours in advance, and with 94 per cent accuracy. Transformative will soon help physicians and hospitals save many thousands of lives each year,” Lewin says.
Transformative’s other co-founders are Marek Sirendi, PhD, a physicist named to MIT’s Innovators Under 35 list, and Marek Rei, PhD, a machine learning researcher at Imperial College London. The company formed in 2016 through Entrepreneur First’s start-up program and participated in the Philips HealthWorks program.
Oks, Tera Ventures’ founding partner, says that “investing in future technologies is essential so that the younger generation of researchers and innovators can develop solutions that will affect the future of all humankind.”
Tera Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Tallinn, Estonia and focused on exceptional founders from Estonia, Scandinavia and CEE disrupting digital space globally. Tera builds presence and networks in the markets where our portfolio companies want to expand to – the UK, the US, and Asia. With presence in Estonia, Finland, and California, Tera Ventures is supported by a global advisory network and provides portfolio companies with access to expertise and hands-on support necessary to grow from seed stage to successful exit.
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