SiPhox Health – a leader in building the next generation of lab-grade home health testing with silicon photonics – recently announced it raised $27 million in funding, including a $10 million Seed financing and a $17 million Series A round. Intel Capital led the Series A round with participation from Khosla Ventures, Kortex Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Metaplanet, Shorewind Capital, LongeVC, Overlap Holdings, and Duke Capital Partners. Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator led the Seed funding with participation from Metaplanet, Massachusetts Manufacturing Innovation Initiative, Rsquared, Vituity, Paul Buchheit, Balaji Srinivasan, Bob Lee, Longevity Tech Fund, and several others. Intel Capital managing director Srini Ananth will join SiPhox Health’s board of directors to accelerate the company’s growth further.
Six out of ten Americans are living with chronic diseases. Access to low-cost, convenient health testing can help prevent and manage these conditions, improving patients’ lives and enabling many healthcare innovations bottlenecked by existing testing approaches. And in response to this crisis, MIT scientists Diedrik Vermeulen and Michael Dubrovsky envisioned using silicon photonics. This semiconductor technology transformed internet connectivity to put a lab-grade health testing device in every home.
The Series A funding will enable team expansion as the company works towards FDA clearance for its SiPhox Home platform. The platform offers a broad menu of proteins and hormone tests from a finger prick blood sample, with results in five minutes or less. In the meantime, SiPhox Health has launched a mail-in blood collection kit that measures 17 biomarkers for inflammation, metabolic, hormonal, and cardiovascular health.
KEY QUOTES:
“At SiPhox Health, we are leveraging the trillions of dollars invested in the semiconductor industry to enable lab-quality results in a consumer-ready, user-friendly device.”
— Diedrik Vermeulen, SiPhox Health co-founder and CEO, and a silicon photonics pioneer who played a crucial role in developing the first coherent silicon photonic transceiver chip, now responsible for a significant share of global internet traffic.
“SiPhox’s goal is to create category-defining health tracking products starting with the SiPhox Home, which is a 100-fold improvement over existing blood diagnostics. Eventually, our technology will enable the ultimate wearable device for measuring proteins, hormones, and small molecules continuously. Every cell in the human body is a much more advanced sensor than anything on the market today, showing we are nowhere near the physical limits for performance and miniaturization in diagnostics.”
— Michael Dubrovsky, SiPhox Health co-founder and Chief Product Officer
“The rapid growth in telehealth and home health sectors necessitates a new paradigm in diagnostics. SiPhox Health’s fast and accurate at-home testing is poised to change the patient journey for employers, pharma, insurers, and health systems. Investments in silicon photonics over the past two decades for the datacom and telecom industry have enabled the massive scaling of the internet and cloud computing. This has set the stage for startups like SiPhox to apply silicon photonics technology to new frontiers. We are highly impressed with their technology and approach to tackling this opportunity.”
— Srini Ananth, managing director at Intel Capital
