Snap40 today announced it has raked in £2 million in Seed funding from investment firm Par Equity. The first tranche of the investment closed at the end of September.
The startup will utilize the money to give its engineering and data science team a boost, complete clinical trials and obtain regulatory approval. It also has plans to expand to the US and open an office there in 2017.
Christopher McCann, co-founder and CEO, spoke about the announcement,
This investment is based on the strength of our product and the progress of our amazing team. We are excited to work with Par Equity and the rest of our shareholders as we build Snap40 into a dominant player in the global people-health monitoring market. We have a product that can save lives, while providing clinical and economic benefits to health services.
Snap40’s flagship product is a wearable device which has the ability to monitor patients’ respiratory and heart rate from the upper arm across more health indicators than any other single device on the market.
Christopher says the need for such a service first surfaced when he was a medical student at the University of Dundee. He started the company after he worked on hospital wards where patients were only intermittently monitored, something that led to patients “avoidably deteriorating” because of late recognition of warning signs. According to a comment by the company,
By alerting doctors and nurses early, they can take action, potentially saving the patient’s life, improving outcomes, and allowing them to return home sooner.
The startup has also produced what it says is a secure software platform which plugs in dates from the wearable device, calculates vital signs and then assesses risk using an early warning score based on established thresholds.
Robert Higginson, partner at Par Equity, also commented on the funding,
We are delighted to be supporting snap40, a business with an ambitious vision for the future. The team has already demonstrated the ability to deliver to its plan, which is why we are supporting the business from such an early stage. This is a global market with significant potential and we believe snap40 is the company to succeed.
Snap40 is currently demonstrating the performance of its product in a major clinical trial at an unnamed UK hospital.
