London-based healthtech startup Transformative secures $1.7M seed funding to predict sudden cardiac arrest

Every year, 292,000 adults and 7,000 children suffer cardiac arrest in US hospitals, with only 25% surviving to hospital discharge, according to a 2019 estimate by the American Heart Association. Globally, 6 million people die from sudden cardiac arrest annually.

Enter Transformative, a healthtech startup with the first patented technology that predicts sudden cardiac arrest by analyzing data from patient monitoring devices that are standard in hospitals. The American Heart Association recommends early intervention – which Transformative’s technology enables – as the centerpiece of its guidelines on improving cardiac arrest care.

Today, Transformative announced it has raised a $1.7 million seed round to obtain FDA clearance for its first product and to begin developing technologies that predict other life-threatening conditions. The round was led by Tera Ventures. The round also includes funding from the Wellcome Trust, which provided Transformative a Healthcare Innovator Award, and from InHealth Ventures, which had previously invested in Transformative’s pre-seed round. Investors Andrus Oks of Tera Ventures and Nick Slater of AI Seed are joining Transformative’s board.

Transformative will use its seed funding to obtain FDA clearance for its first product and to begin developing technologies that predict other life-threatening conditions, according to Josh Oppenheimer, MD, MBA, the company’s co-founder and CEO and a practicing emergency medicine physician.

Founded in 2017 by Joshua Oppenheimer, Marek Rei, and Marek Sirendi, the London, England-based Transformative collects and translates clinical data into real-time, predictive assessments that guide the actions of patients and healthcare providers. osh Oppenheimer, MD, MBA, the company’s co-founder and CEO is a practicing emergency medicine physician.

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. “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,” Lewin said.

Transformative’s other co-founders are 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 formed in 2016 through Entrepreneur First’s startup program and participated in the Philips HealthWorks program.

“On each shift, I experience the tragedy of delayed care and the marvel of early, preventive interventions,” Oppenheimer said. “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.”

Transformative operates in the US, the UK, and Estonia. Its predictive patient monitoring software identifies patients at imminent risk of life-threatening medical events, enabling preventive care. Its first patented technology predicts in-hospital sudden cardiac arrest.