Fifth Eye team members (left to right: Bryce Benson, Jen Baird, Mark Salamango, Jeff Basch and Ashwin Belle / Image credit: Daryl Marshke, Michigan Photography)
Ann Arbor, Michigan-based medical device software company Fifth Eye announced it raised $11.5 million in a Series A round of funding. This round of funding was led by healthcare investors Arboretum Ventures and Cultivation Capital. MINTS — which is the direct investing arm of the University of Michigan’s endowment — joined this round along with previous investors Invest Michigan and 35 private angel investors.
Fifth Eye launched in 2017 and the company has licensed technology from the University of Michigan. And the company also announced Arboretum Ventures managing partner Thomas Shehab, MD, MM, Cultivation Capital Life Sciences managing partner Fund William Schmidt, and Fifth Eye CTO and co-founder Mark Salamango are joining Jen (Jennifer) Baird on Fifth Eye’s board of directors.
Fifth Eye’s software sets up clinical early warning systems for hospitals. The funding will be used for securing FDA clearance of Fifth Eye’s first product, supporting clinical studies with multiple health systems, and enabling the commercial launch of the Analytic for Hemodynamic Instability. Fifth Eye’s goal is to improve the quality and cost of care with intuitive real-time early warning systems using continuous physiologic waveforms.
“An important need exists for tools that identify patients at risk for clinical decompensation,” said Shehab in a statement. “Arboretum Ventures is excited to partner with the Fifth Eye team to develop a product that will positively impact patient care while improving healthcare efficiency and costs.”
Clinicians need better detection systems for unexpected patient deterioration. One of the most common causes of deterioration and death of critically ill or injured patients is hemodynamic instability — which is when blow flow to vital organs degrades to levels that are insufficient to support vital organ functions especially when it is undetected.
The common causes leading to hemodynamic instability includes hemorrhage/post-operative bleeding, sepsis caused by infections like pneumonia, acute brain injuries, and respiratory difficulties. And hemodynamic instability called by these conditions can lead to sudden low blood pressure, heart failure, and cardiac arrest.
“There is no question that early detection of hemodynamic instability can have a meaningful impact for both patients and providers,” added Schmidt. “Cultivation Capital is excited to work with the entire Fifth Eye team and Arboretum Ventures to bring this exciting technology forward.”
Fifth Eye’s early warning system aims to continuously detect the emergence of hemodynamic instability and forecast patient trajectory using a single existing electrocardiogram (ECG) waveform. This will give doctors and nurses notice about potential trouble hours in advance of other methods.
And Fifth Eye’s browser-based user interface provides a first score in five minutes without a baseline being needed. Plus it shows minute-to-minute continuous patient assessment, advance warning, real-time treatment feedback, and easy to interpret trends without the need for electronic health record inputs.
“We are excited to have the strong support of such experienced health care investors as we bring our newly developed medical device software product through the FDA clearance process and into the hands of hospitals in the next two years. Saving lives is what motivates both our team and our clinical champions. This capital round gives us the fuel to accomplish those goals,” explained Baird.
