Diabetes and metabolic disorders keep rising worldwide, yet most people still rely on finger‑prick tests or invasive continuous glucose monitors that use needles or microneedles. These methods are painful and inconvenient, which hurts adherence and limits continuous insight into metabolic health outside clinics.
Liom, a Schwyz‑based HealthTech startup, is developing a fully non‑invasive glucose‑monitoring wearable and has just extended its Series A by €13.9 million (CHF 13 million), bringing the round to €40.8 million (CHF 38 million) and total funding to €67.6 million (CHF 63 million).
Existing investors led the extension, joined by new backers including Red Bull Ventures and former On Running co‑CEO Marc Maurer, reflecting confidence that Liom can move lab‑grade spectroscopy into a consumer‑sized device.
Help people see how food, exercise and lifestyle affect their bodies
Liom Health, formerly known as Spiden, was founded in 2017 by entrepreneur Leo Grünstein. From the outset, his goal was to move health monitoring away from occasional tests toward continuous, personalised feedback people can use in daily life.
The team set out to crack what many researchers had called a “holy grail”: accurate, non‑invasive glucose monitoring that does not require needle‑based calibration for each user.
Liom’s platform is based on Raman spectroscopy, a light‑based method that reads biochemical signatures through the skin and infers glucose levels without drawing blood or inserting filaments. Recent miniaturisation work has increased light-throughput to the point that the system can outperform some table‑sized lab devices by around 12x, while fitting into a smartwatch‑scale form factor, delivering more than 24 hours of battery life, and enabling scalable manufacturing.
In clinical studies, Liom has demonstrated non‑invasive, calibration‑free glucose measurements in more than 100 subjects, including an external trial in which its benchtop system and AI models achieved a mean absolute relative difference of 14.5% without per‑subject calibration—comparable to early generations of needle‑based continuous glucose monitors.
At the consumer level, Liom wants to expand the market defined by the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch, Fitbit, Garmin, Whoop and Oura by adding a fundamentally new sensor layer, rather than another software feature on top of the same hardware.
What’s next?
The new funding will help the company shift from pure R&D into full product development, validate its wrist‑worn prototype in real‑world conditions and prepare for large‑scale manufacturing and regulatory approval.
