AI-powered healthtech startup raises $21.5M to monitor hearts

April 30, 2019
doctor ablacon colorado tech
image via shutterstock

Artificial intelligence may not be replacing human doctors quite yet; but what computers lack in bedside manner, they make up for in the ability to recognize nuanced patterns.

Ablacon, a Colorado-based healthtech startup, uses artificial intelligence to monitor how electricity flows through a patient’s heart to help doctors understand the causes of irregular heartbeats. And the company just raised a $21.5 million Series A round to boost its tech development efforts and pay for clinical trials.

Vivek Reddy, MD, a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai, said in a statement that the startup’s mapping technology has shown a lot of promise in the first stages of testing.

Daniel Cremers, who researches computer vision and pattern recognition at the Technical University of Munich, expressed similar enthusiasm for the technology:

“The idea to leverage techniques and algorithms from computer vision to analyze electric signals in the heart is ingenious,” he said in a statement. “Ablacon combines concepts from both the medical world and machine intelligence in a way that I think is very promising.”

Until Tuesday’s funding announcement, Ablacon has largely kept a low profile. The startup has 10 employees listed on LinkedIn, and minimal information is available on its website. Built In has reached out to the company for additional details.

According to the LinkedIn profile of Peter Ruppersberg, Ablacon’s founder, chief scientific officer and president, the company got its start in 2015, soon after Ruppersberg sold his last startup, Sophono, to Medtronic. Ablacon’s technology received a CE marking, indicating compliance with European health and safety standards, in 2018.

Ajax Health led Tuesday’s funding round. The lead investor’s CEO, Duke Rohlen, is taking the helm at Ablacon as part of the deal.

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