Sonde Health has raised $19.25 million in Series B funding to globalize its voice-based disease screening technology with partners in South Korea and India. CEO David Liu tells Axios EXCLUSIVELY.
Important reasons: Noninvasive health tracking has gained significant traction during the pandemic, and voice markers have long loomed as a lucrative potential area for further exploration.
Transaction Details: Partners Investment led the round, bringing Sonde’s total funding to just over $35 million. NEOM Investment Fund, KT Corporation, Insider’s PureTech Health, M Ventures, MP Healthcare Venture Management, Neoteny and Evidity Health Capital also participated.
- As part of the salary increase, Partners’ managing director Joonsoo Kim will join Sonde’s board of directors.
- Using the new capital, Sonde plans to expand nationwide into East and Southeast Asia, further refine and validate its products in clinical trials, and build tools for more health conditions. increase.
- “We are beginning to prove and verify everything we are talking about,” said Liu.
Usage: Sonde licenses respiratory and behavioral health screening technology to telemedicine, pharmaceutical and healthcare companies.
- The company’s technology measures a variety of vocal biomarkers that can indicate a patient’s behavioral health, including fluency, control, liveliness (assessed by changes in pitch), speech patterns and intelligibility.
- Sonde’s platform also measures respiratory health and analyzes breathing and vocal performance.
- “For the first time in a long time, we can now do things that don’t bother people, rather than having a diagnosis or invasive test done at home. Voice provides an early warning system. ” says Liu.
- The convenience and potential of voice biomarkers to detect various diseases has generated interest.
yes and: Sonde claims to have the largest and most diverse health-labeled speech dataset, consisting of approximately 1.2 million speech samples from approximately 85,000 subjects across four continents.
Reality check: COVID-19 in particular has helped Sonde hone its skills in respiratory diseases, but the company has no plans to invest further in COVID research, Liu and Kim told Axios.
- “we see that [Covid] It serves as a proof-of-concept for respiratory states,” says Kim.
- “It’s very difficult to think that one device can help diagnose depression or anxiety,” says Liu. “But if we can provide [vocal] Providing data and insights to doctors and therapists really enriches medical workflows. ”
- Additionally, Sonde sees potential in its technology as a screening tool, but it cannot yet diagnose any conditions.
Zoom in: The therapeutic areas in which the company is researching are:
- depression and anxiety. The company is conducting a tool validation study in collaboration with McMaster University.
- Most of the company’s efforts in the areas of asthma, cystic fibrosis and COPD are in the joint development stage with partners such as Montefiore and the University of Cambridge.
- Dementia and mild cognitive impairment in early stage research with partners including the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
- A driving disorder that is just beginning to evaluate its potential with automakers, including Tesla.
State of play: In recent years, start-ups and tech giants alike have strengthened their voice in health. for example:
Yes, but: Amazon, which one? deployed last year The Alexa device is being used by multiple hospitals and in February Partnership with Teladocteeth End of support For HIPAA-protected Alexa tools.
What’s next: The company recently signed a second deal with Qualcomm to build chipsets incorporating Sonde’s voice biomarker technology.
- The first deal for 2021 focused on chipsets for mobile devices. The current deal also includes IoT chipsets that can be put into devices such as wearables.
- “By the first quarter of next year, we will have a working version of the technology on mobile chipsets,” said Liu.
