Onera Health, a specialist in sleep diagnostic solutions and services and last year’s winner of Innovation Origins’ Gerard & Anton Award, has raised $8.3 million euros (9.3 million dollars) in Series A funding. Led by Jazz Pharmaceuticals, imec.xpand, as well as other investors including imec and BOM, this funding is a key step towards bringing the healthcare startup closer to realizing its mission, Onera says: to revolutionize sleep diagnostics with the world’s first at-home medical grade sleep diagnostic patch system.
Onera is a spinoff of imec Netherlands, based at High Tech Campus Eindhoven.
“The need for better sleep testing is great”, Onera says in an explanatory note. “One in five people struggles to get through the day because a sleep disorder affects them at night. Whether it’s insomnia, sleep apnea, narcolepsy or a host of other disorders, people suffering from these conditions don’t often seek out a proper diagnosis. For many, the process of being tested at a sleep clinic is uncomfortable, inconvenient, intimidating and expensive, and even motivated patients often need to wait months for an appointment.”
“Eindhoven is a great incubator for successful startups, and Onera continues that tradition.”
For Jazz Pharmaceuticals, the funding expresses a strong belief in “Onera’s hardware and software innovations, as well as its streamlined service model, which have the potential to empower clinicians to provide patients with optimal sleep care”, as Jed Black, M.D., Senior Vice President, Sleep and CNS Medicine at Jazz Pharmaceuticals says. “We believe the solutions Onera Health are developing could transform diagnostic and treatment-monitoring processes in sleep medicine.”
Sleep testing solutions that are quick, convenient and clinically accurate
Headquartered in California’s Silicon Valley, with R&D offices in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Onera focuses on breakthrough sleep testing solutions that are quick, convenient and clinically accurate. Two simple patches replace cumbersome sensors usually attached to the face, scalp, chest and limbs. Doctors can benefit from test results matching the accuracy of conventional in-lab sleep clinics while patients will rest easier being monitored at home or in a medical setting suggested by their doctor. Ultimately, patients and physicians alike can enjoy easier access to accurate sleep diagnostics at a fraction of the cost.
Onera’s goal is to resolve these pain-points through the development and use of its sleep diagnostics service model. As Onera’s Co-Founder & CEO, Raphael Michel says, “Our mission is to help the medical field provide the much-needed answers for millions who are affected by sleep disorders. For far too long, people avoided searching for those answers because understanding their issues was expensive, inconvenient or unreliable. And nobody enjoys spending hours hooked up to sensors in a sleep lab. Soon, thanks to our technology partnership with imec, our medical-grade, disposable patches will accurately diagnose sleep-related ailments in the comfort of a patient’s own bed and using it will be as simple as putting on a band-aid. We’re making sleep diagnosis accessible to many without compromising quality. And thanks to the investment from Jazz and others, we keep expanding the continuum of sleep care.”
John Baekelmans, Managing Director and VP at imec in the Netherlands, is pleased to see Onera’s progress and is excited for its future with imec: “Eindhoven is a great incubator for successful startups, and Onera continues that tradition. Imec looks forward to continuing to support and collaborate with this ambitious entrepreneurial team.”
Related Posts
