Lapsi Health, a developer of audio-driven medtech and remote healthcare tools based in the Netherlands, has raised $3.5M in an oversubscribed seed round.
Modi Ventures, a Texas-based family office, led the round. It also included participation from two of Lapsi’s pre-seed investors, Vendash and Bolwork, as well as BeKey, an Israeli-Ukrainian startup hub focused on software development.
Lapsi Health was established in 2021 by Jhonatan Bringas Dimitriades, Diana van Stijn, Seamus Holohan, and Rodrigo Alvez with the goal of improving remote healthcare delivery by enabling clinicians to screen, monitor, and treat patients away from the clinic using a library of clinical stethoscope ausculatory sounds, such as breathing sounds in the lungs.
The company has increased from 4 to more than 10 employees (including their Head of Engineering, Toni Leinonen, Haltian’s founder and a former team captain who oversaw the creation of the Oura Ring) and 8 advisors in the last 10 months.
Stepping up US operations
The startup would create medical devices, telemedicine platforms, remote monitoring systems, and digital therapeutics using its database of stethoscope audio data. Lapsi Health is stepping up operations in the US in anticipation of an FDA regulatory submission now that it has $3.5M in seed money.
Starting this year, the company welcomed several world healthcare leaders to their Advisory Board, including Craig Lipset, Rafael Grossman, Aline Noizet, Suzanne Terheggen, Carlos Sendon, and Amir Lahav. Junaid Bajwa, MD, Chief Medical Scientist at Microsoft, joined the company’s Advisory Board in the fourth quarter of 2022. “With his vast med-tech experience, we will be able to develop and iterate even faster,” said Jhonatan Bringas.
Lapsi Health received €1.1M in prize money after winning the EU-funded EUREKA Eurostars startup competition in the middle of last year.
The startup was getting ready to announce its €700,000 pre-seed raise at this time last year. The team launched “four generations of prototypes and two native applications” by the end of 2022.
Jhonatan Bringas Dimitriades, CEO of Lapsi Health, said, “During the year we released 4 generations of prototypes and two native applications. We have been able to validate our technology and showcase it in several venues worldwide and to several medical leaders. This helped us to secure the next step in the funding for our company, now with the goal of bringing our technology to the market during 2023.”
Diana van Stijn, Lapsi chief medical officer and co-founder, added, “Data driven decisions are the next step to improving healthcare, patient empowerment, clinical intelligence and to make clinical research more democratized. These are the ideals that inspired us to create Lapsi Health.”
