Sava Raises $8M Seed to Build a Continuous, Painless Biosensing Platform for Preventative Health
June 21, 2024
Sava, a London-based medical device company, has emerged from stealth with $8 million in seed funding led by Balderton Capital and Exor Ventures. The round brings Sava's total funding to $13 million, including earlier backing from angel investors, the European Union, and UK Government support through Innovate UK. The company will use the investment to expand its team, develop its next-generation product line with high-throughput manufacturing capability, and demonstrate the platform's clinical performance through ongoing trials.
Sava was founded by Renato Circi and Rafael Michali, two bioengineers who met while researching at Imperial College London. The pair spent five years developing the platform in stealth before announcing their funding, during which time they obtained approval from the UK's Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to proceed with clinical trials on patients with diabetes. The MHRA approval process is among the most rigorous in the world, assessing both the safety and performance of the device and the design of the clinical investigation that will validate it.
The technology at the heart of Sava's platform is a minimally invasive wearable microsensor that detects molecules in the interstitial fluid just beneath the surface of the skin. Unlike blood glucose monitoring — which requires a finger prick to obtain a blood sample — interstitial fluid monitoring is painless and can be conducted continuously without disrupting daily life. The sensor is integrated into a small, connected patch that streams data directly to the user's smartphone, providing real-time insights into physiological parameters that have historically required clinic visits or invasive procedures to measure. Sava's initial focus is glucose monitoring for diabetes, a condition projected to affect one in eight adults — approximately 783 million people — by 2045.
Beyond glucose, the company's vision is broader. The interstitial fluid contains a rich array of biomarkers — metabolites, electrolytes, hormones, and other molecules — that reflect the body's real-time physiological state. Sava's multi-molecule sensing architecture is designed to eventually detect a range of these simultaneously, creating a continuous, personalised health monitoring capability that could shift healthcare from a reactive, symptom-driven model to a preventative one. The founders describe their goal as building a new operating system for health monitoring, making precision health monitoring accessible, affordable, and available to everyone.
Balderton partner James Wise commented that the product could become the defining wearable health monitoring device of the coming decade, serving both preventative health users and patients managing chronic diseases. Exor Ventures, the early-stage investment arm of the Agnelli family's holding company, noted that Sava's unique approach could form a foundational element of a new healthcare architecture.
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