- Transformative — a healthcare company that has developed software that can predict sudden cardiac arrest — announced that it raised $1.7 million in a seed round of funding led by Tera Ventures
Transformative — a healthcare company that has developed software that can predict sudden cardiac arrest — announced that it raised $1.7 million in a seed round of funding led by Tera Ventures. This round of funding was provided by the Wellcome Trust and InHealth Ventures. And investors Andrus Oks of Tera Ventures and Nick Slater of AI Seed are joining Transformative’s board.
What does Transformative do? Transformative’s first patented technology is able to predict sudden cardiac arrest by analyzing data from patient monitoring devices that are standard in hospitals.
With the seed funding, Transformative will obtain FDA clearance for its first product and to start developing technologies that predict other life-threatening conditions, said Josh Oppenheimer, MD, MBA — who is the company’s co-founder and CEO and a practicing emergency medicine physician.
“On each shift, I experience the tragedy of delayed care and the marvel of early, preventive interventions,” said Oppenheimer. “AI-augmented patient monitoring detects subtle changes preceding patient deterioration that are invisible to physicians, allowing us to be in the right place at the right time and save more lives.”
There are 292,000 adults and 7,000 children who suffer cardiac arrest in US hospitals each year with only 25% surviving to hospital discharge, according to a 2019 estimate by the American Heart Association. And globally, 6 million people die from sudden cardiac arrest annually. The American Heart Association recommends early intervention – which Transformative’s technology enables – as the centerpiece of its guidelines on improving cardiac arrest care.
“While this is disheartening, there is new hope. Transformative has developed amazing and disruptive technology capable of predicting sudden cardiac arrest minutes to hours in advance, and with 94% accuracy. Transformative will soon help physicians and hospitals save many thousands of lives each year,” explained Jack Lewin, MD, the Chairman of the National Coalition on Health Care, the former CEO of the American College of Cardiology, and an advisor to Transformative noted that many patients who survive in-hospital cardiac arrest suffer serious cognitive deficits due to delayed care.
Transformative’s co-founders also include Marek Sirendi, PhD (a physicist named to MIT’s Innovators Under 35 list) and Marek Rei, PhD (a machine learning researcher at Imperial College London). The company launched in 2016 through Entrepreneur First’s s
