- Intu Diagnostics, a Fraunhofer spinout based in Leipzig, has raised €1.1 million in a bridge round, bringing its total funding to more than €3 million. The round was backed by BSV Ventures and SAB.
- The startup has created a PCR-quality HPV test that works without a lab, electricity, or trained staff. Users see results from a colour change in just 30 minutes.
- Cervical cancer causes about 350,000 deaths among women each year. Around 85% of these cases occur in countries that lack sufficient laboratory facilities for routine screening.
Every year, about 350,000 women die from cervical cancer, even though most cases could be prevented. The biggest challenge is logistics, not medicine. PCR testing, the gold standard for detecting HPV, requires a lab, trained staff, and specialised equipment that many places lack.
Intu Diagnostics, a company from the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology in Leipzig, wants to remove these obstacles. The company recently raised €1.1 million in a bridge round, bringing its total funding to over €3 million.
BSV Ventures, a Baltic deep-tech and life science fund with offices in Lithuania, Estonia, and Finland, supported the round, along with the Saxonian Development Bank and several business angels.
The funds will go toward protecting intellectual property, running pilot manufacturing trials, and getting ready for the next seed round.
What Intu has built
Intu Diagnostics, founded in 2023 in Leipzig by Dr Skaiste Arbaciauskaite and Dr Dirk Kuhlmeier, is developing an all-in-one diagnostic cartridge that detects a pathogen’s genetic material using the same method as lab PCR tests, but without any extra equipment.
There is no need for a reader device, power source, app, or special training. Users just collect a sample, put it in the cartridge, and check for a colour change within 30 minutes. The kit includes everything needed.
This method is very different from standard rapid antigen tests, which detect proteins and provide faster results but often miss infections. Intu’s platform works at the molecular level, which the company says means fewer false negatives and no need for the usual lab setup for molecular tests.
The first use of Intu’s platform is HPV screening in women’s health, an area that is attracting more investor attention. For example, Teal Health in the US recently raised $10 million for at-home cervical cancer screening, and French startup En Carta Diagnostics got $1.5 million for affordable paper-based HPV tests.
Intu plans to expand its platform to test for respiratory viruses like COVID-19, RSV, and flu, and later for sexually transmitted infections, malaria, and tuberculosis. These diseases often affect people in low-resource areas. In 2020, a prototype was tested in Tanzania in collaboration with the Kilimanjaro Clinical Research Institute to diagnose eye infections caused by Chlamydia trachomatis, the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide.
The market Intu is targeting
Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide. The WHO reports about 660,000 new cases and 350,000 deaths in 2022, with 85% of cases in developing countries. In these places, HPV causes nearly 12% of all tumours in women. Late diagnosis leads to worse outcomes, and poor screening infrastructure makes things harder. Even though women’s health is growing fast in venture capital, getting diagnostics into low-resource markets remains a big challenge.
The point-of-care diagnostics market, which offers tests that deliver results close to the patient rather than in central labs, is highly competitive. Still, Intu faces less direct competition.
Abbott’s ID NOW and Cepheid’s Xpert platforms provide rapid molecular results but require powered devices. Becton Dickinson and bioMérieux work in central labs. Right now, none of the big companies offers a molecular test that is electricity-free and instrument-free for consumers or low-resource settings.
What comes next
The bridge round is meant to help Intu reach important goals for its next seed investment, such as securing intellectual property, developing a manufacturable cartridge, and collecting pilot data ready for production.
Since its €1.8 million pre-seed round in 2024, the team has grown to 12 people and has participated in industry events across three continents. The company plans to launch consumer tests in 2027.
One of the main challenges for the next seed round is demonstrating that the product can deliver molecular-level accuracy and operate with minimal infrastructure, while remaining affordable for the women who need it most. The bridge round helps the company keep moving toward this goal.
