Degree Zero Well being has raised $6.9 million for its imaginative and prescient of steady hormone monitoring with a wearable patch
Degree Zero Well being, a female-founded startup centered on steady hormone monitoring, has landed $6.9 million in a pre-seed spherical for its well being monitoring wearable that eliminates the necessity to head to the lab to get blood drawn.
Swiss VC agency Redalpine led the spherical, which included a number of different enterprise capital and personal fairness companies.
“Hormones are crucial to our well being throughout our complete lifespan,” the startup shared on LinkedIn in a submit asserting the funding. “Our goal is obvious: allow entry to a wealth of knowledge that hormonal patterns give us—from medical functions to wellness and past.”
Degree Zero Well being has honed in on creating a minimally invasive wearable machine worn on the arm that gives knowledge correlated with blood readings by interstitial fluid. The machine then gives real-time updates on hormone ranges.
Behind Degree Zero Well being are co-founders Ula Rustamova, a former enterprise tech lead at Palantir and Irene Jia, a bioengineer who labored for Philips in analysis and growth.
“I’ve to pinch myself that that is certainly what we’re getting nearer to each single day – a breakthrough know-how that may have a ripple impact on healthcare for years to come back,” Rustamova, Degree Zero Well being’s CEO, posted on LinkedIn.
She famous that whereas the funding broke the file for Europe’s largest pre-seed spherical for a female-founded workforce, she’s conflicted: “It’s an instance of what’s attainable, and these tales must be highlighted. However I additionally hope sooner or later, virtually each article doesn’t have to spotlight that we’re certainly feminine,” Rustamova wrote.
As of now, steady monitoring is often related to glucose—a know-how Rustamova credited with revolutionizing diabetes care throughout a presentation at Entrepreneur First’s Summer season ’24 Demo Day, the place she famous that main names and consultants from Harvard and Mount Sinai have joined the workforce.
“The corporate that makes CGMs makes $4 billion income and that’s simply from glucose,” she identified. “And we’re addressing markets a lot larger than that, beginning with IVF and low testosterone, the place clinics know the ache, they usually’re lining as much as work with us.”
The startup instructed TechCrunch that it intends to have its wearable patch cleared for prescription use subsequent yr for intermittent hormone testing related to medical use circumstances reminiscent of fertility and low testosterone and hopes to have the machine delivered to market in 2028 to repeatedly measure progesterone, estrogen and testosterone.
“Hopefully, this yr we need to present some degree of correlation [between levels of hormones the wearable patch can detect and levels detected via a blood draw] — that’s the promise I need to ship with the pre-seed cash,” Rustamova instructed the publication.
“For too lengthy, hormone testing has relied on invasive blood attracts that seize only a single second in time,” Redalpine shared on LinkedIn. “Degree Zero Well being is altering the sport – their wearable will allow real-time, distant hormone monitoring, reworking look after IVF, menopause, testosterone remedy and past. With exact engineering and software program, and spectacular pace to execution, Degree Zero Well being is the proper instance of deeptech assembly real-world affect. As Philip [Kneis], investor at Redalpine and board member of Degree Zero Well being, places it: We did it for blood stress, and we’ll do it once more for hormones.’”
The startup is now targeted on increasing its London operations and is on the hunt for a founder affiliate, in addition to six different roles, together with a head of analysis and growth and biosensor analysis scientist.
