SAVA raises $8 million (£6.3 million) in Seed funding to build preventative, personalised, precision health monitoring at scale
- SAVA is developing the first-ever multi-molecule biosensing wearable capable of detecting biomarkers just below the skin’s surface, enabled by its novel microsensing technology.
- The company’s initial device disrupts the $8 billion Continuous Glucose Monitoring market by providing a pain-free, low-cost, and accurate solution to patients with diabetes and recently gained MHRA approval to go ahead with its first clinical trial.
- This funding will be used to expand SAVA’s team, design its next-generation product line with high-throughput manufacturing capability, and demonstrate the platform’s clinical performance.
21 June, 2024: SAVA – the startup reinventing health monitoring with its real-time, affordable and painless microsensor – is emerging from five years of stealth today to announce it has raised $8 million (£6.3 million) in a Seed funding round led by Balderton Capital and Exor Ventures.
Founded by Renato Circi and Rafael Michali, bioengineers from Imperial College London, SAVA has developed a novel, ground-breaking microsensing device to detect molecules in the interstitial fluid, just under the skin. Its smart, connected wearable patch has been designed to streamline this data and deliver it directly to a user’s phone.
Preventative, personalised and effortless
SAVA’s first microsensor is focused on glucose monitoring for people with diabetes, which is projected to impact 1 in 8 adults, approximately 783 million people, by 2045. People with diabetes rely on accurate glucose monitoring technologies to adequately manage their condition. This has seen a growing number of health institutions globally make CGMs a default for diabetes care. The NHS alone has committed to providing every person in the UK with Type I diabetes with a CGM by 2025. Due to the scale of the diabetes epidemic worldwide, the CGM market is worth $8.2 billion and growing 10% year-on-year.
The startup recently gained approval from the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to go ahead with clinical trials on patients with diabetes, which will help Sava validate its breakthrough technology on a larger scale. The MHRA validation process is one of the most stringent processes worldwide, assessing the safety and performance of the device, as well as the design of the upcoming clinical investigation. SAVA’s microsensor will not only offer pain-free, real-time insights for users, but will do so at a much more affordable, accessible price, with an upcoming clinical study scheduled to start with world-leading investigators from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Much more than diabetes
Yet glucose monitoring is just the tip of the iceberg. With its modular design, SAVA’s sensor will, in time, be able to simultaneously monitor multiple molecules. Multi-analyte sensing unlocks the ability to monitor a vast range of conditions – from chronic conditions, to next-gen wellbeing applications, drug adherence to personalised therapy and more. SAVA’s aim is to power the next era of healthcare.
This funding round brings the total raised by the London-based startup to $13 million from leading VC firms, angel investors, the European Union and UK Government (through Innovate UK). The team has rapidly grown to over 40 people, including some of the creators of the Abbott, Dexcom and Medtronic CGMs. The funding will be used to further expand SAVA’s team, design its next-generation product line with high-throughput manufacturing capability, and demonstrate the platform’s clinical performance.
Renato Circi, co-founder, SAVA said: “At SAVA we are tackling preventable illness by building a new operating system for health monitoring. Our microsensor will revolutionise healthcare by making world-leading monitoring technology available to all. With this capital, we can accelerate our goal of creating a new paradigm for healthcare – preventative, personalised and painless.”
Rafael Michali, co-founder, SAVA said: “SAVA’s mission is to transform healthcare from a curative to a preventative system, by empowering people to take control of their health through effortless access to real-time health insights. The current healthcare system cannot meet this demand and SAVA will bridge this gap by providing the foundational architecture of a new biosensing ecosystem.”
James Wise, Partner, Balderton said: “This could be the defining product in personal health monitoring in the coming decade, and an essential tool for patients and clinicians in diagnosing and treating many chronic diseases as well. Renato and Rafael have a compelling user-centric vision to revolutionise chronic disease management and preventative care, and the credibility and knowledge to execute in this vital area.”
“SAVA’s unique approach and novel technology underline its potential to become a foundation of a new healthcare system. It offers a platform that addresses the needs of both patients and healthcare systems and which will allow other companies to build upon.” – said Noam Ohana and Ileana Pirozzi, of Exor Ventures.
About SAVA Technologies Ltd:
SAVA is a venture-backed consumer and medical device company developing an innovative wearable biosensor platform that can detect molecules just under the skin. The company has developed a novel microsensor technology that monitors biomarkers in the body in a painless, real-time and affordable way, starting with, but not limited to, glucose.
About Balderton Capital
Balderton Capital is a multistage venture firm with more than two decades of experience supporting Europe’s best founders from Seed to IPO. We have both early and growth funds and invest across the technology sector, with a proven track record backing fintech, B2B SaaS, digital health, mobility, gaming and marketplace companies. Previous investments include Darktrace (LON: DARK), Depop, Flywire (NASDAQ: FLYW), Kobalt, MySQL, Nutmeg, Peakon, Recorded Future, Talend (NASDAQ: TLND) and THG (LON: THG). Balderton’s current portfolio includes: Aircall, Beauty Pie, Contentful, Dream Games, GoCardless, JOKR, Lendable, Matillon, Merama, Revolut, Tibber, Vestiaire Collective, Voi, Wayve and Zoe.
About Exor Ventures
Exor Ventures is the early-stage investment arm of Exor N.V. and was founded in 2018 in New York. We invest in early-stage companies from Seed to Series B, across healthcare, mobility and SaaS/AI. We have a deeply rooted builders’ DNA and a legacy of entrepreneurship inherited from Exor – a fifth-generation family-led business with a century-long history of building or supporting generational companies (Ferrari, Stellantis, Philips, The Economist,…) – that resonates more than ever with founders. Over the last 6 years we have invested in leading companies including: Mistral AI, Via, Brex, Qonto, Alan, Neuralink, Iambic Therapeutics.
