SAVA
SAVA, a startup 'reinventing' health monitoring with its 'real-time, affordable and painless' microsensor – is emerging from five years of stealth to announce it has raised 6.3 million GBP 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.
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 USD 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.
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 over 10 million GBP 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.
