Piur Imaging, an Austrian medical device company enables access to affordable, high-quality healthcare through AI-driven tomographic 3D ultrasound solutions. Now, the company has snapped €4.9 million in a Series A funding round. The investment round was led by Ascend Capital Partners, a female-led healthtech VC. Aescuvest, a prominent healthcare investment firm from Germany, joined as a new shareholder and invested alongside Ascend.
With the latest funding round, Piur will rework and relaunch a major software update and a second-generation sensor that will significantly improve the usability and performance of its device. Piur will also grow its commercial team and user base, as well as scale its current focus markets – Germany, Italy, Spain, and France, and create initial sales in the USA.
“Ultrasound is one of the most important diagnostic imaging tools for certain diseases including vascular, thyroid, abdominal, and cardiac diseases. It is cost-efficient, has no side effects, and is well suited for soft tissue and blood vessel imaging”, explains Frederik Bender, Managing Director & CEO of Piur Imaging. “However, ultrasound is a real-time 2D-imaging modality, which relies on a doctor’s capabilities and experience to come up with a diagnosis based on a series of 2D images of three dimensional organs and structures. Depending on the disease, large inter- and intra-observer variabilities exist, and existing solutions cannot accurately calculate volumetric measurements, only estimations.”
“With tUS Infinity, Piur Imaging offers an integration of software into newly built hardware from egacy device manufacturers. We see significant advantages of this kind of add-on compared to breakthrough technologies as ultrasound technology is globally accepted and understood. Therefore, the solution is easy to explain, and users can see the benefits right away,” said Sebastian Gührs, Partner & Head of Investment at Aescuvest.
Redefines ultrasound with AI
Founded by Frederik Bender and Robert Bauer in 2014 in Vienna, Piur Imaging is a medical device company. Its vision is to enable access to affordable high-quality healthcare through AI-driven tomographic 3D ultrasound solutions – everywhere!
Piur´s ultrasound solution, Piur tUS Infinity is claimed to be the only vendor-independent tomographic 3D ultrasound solution on the market. Infinity can extend any regular ultrasound system with a tomography feature that allows volume acquisitions of organs and structures.
Its AI-driven tomographic 3D ultrasound solution can capture large regions of interest in high-resolution 3D volumes and provide clinical applications for semi-automatic data analysis. The separation of image acquisition from image analysis enables AI-based image analysis and asynchronous remote diagnostics, making ultrasound less operator-dependent and more efficient.
Already, Piur has several distribution partnerships with industry leaders in nuclear medicine and ultrasound lined up for the deployment of its solution.
