Remote patient monitoring startup Sibel Health closed a $30 million Series C funding round on Thursday, bringing its total funding amount to $63 million.
The company — founded in 2018 as a spinout of Northwestern University — has headquarters in the Chicago area with offices in San Diego and Seoul. Its mission is to make healthcare data more useful by developing wearable monitors for the entire clinical care continuum.
Sibel’s remote vital monitoring platform, named Anne One, uses wearable sensors to capture patients’ vital signs — including skin and body temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, step count and body position. The overall goal of the platform is to provide accurate data that clinicians can use to make informed treatment decisions for their patients.
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The company’s sensors are lightweight and adhesive, allowing them to stick to the skin comfortably while continuously monitoring patients. The technology has “form factors that recapitulate a band-aid,” noted CEO Steve Xu.
“[The sensors] are soft, flexible and stretchable, but are able to reproduce vital signs that currently require cabled ICU monitors hooked up to the wall,” he stated.
Comfort comes first because remote monitoring systems don’t work unless patients want to wear them, Xu pointed out. In an 2022 interview with MedCity News, Xu said Sibel’s focus on the patient experience helps it stand out from other remote patient monitoring companies.
The startup makes sure patients have ownership of their data from the moment the adhesive that touches their skin to the final display a nurse or physician sees, he added.
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In addition to its Series C financing round, Sibel also announced its seventh FDA clearance. This decision enables clinicians to use alarms and alerts along with the Anne One platform.
In Xu’s eyes, all patients in the hospital should be monitored continuously.
“The majority of deaths in the hospital setting do not happen in the ICU — they happen in the general wards on an unmonitored bed. By monitoring patients continuously, we have a chance of detecting deterioration early and saving lives,” he declared.
He also noted that the manual process of collecting vitals on unmonitored beds can be quite time-consuming and frustrating for nurses — but Sibel’s wearables can free up their time so they can practice at the top of their license.
With its new influx of capital, Sibel is planning to accelerate the commercial deployment of its sensors across providers and pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and Europe, Xu said.
Some of the company’s customers include AbbVie, Northwestern Medicine and the Capital Region of Denmark.
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