After studying burn and war veterans, entrepreneur Ran Ma hand-made a sock with sensors to detect foot ulcers. Now, his company, SirenSecured $9.5 million, including an $8 million check from a major investor Mölnlycke Healthcare To further the development and adoption of its Diabetic Foot Ulcer (DFU) prevention product. It has raised $43 million to date.
About 830 million people worldwide have diabetes, More than a third Some of them may develop debilitating ulcers during their lifetime, which can lead to serious complications and even amputation in some cases.
Siren's product, Siren Socks, detects early signs of potential foot injury by sensing the patient's foot temperature and identifying hotspots that indicate potential ulcers in real-time. The company claims it can reduce the risk of DFUs by 68% and amputations by up to 83% by collecting continuous data.
“I studied biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins and Northwestern University,” Ma told TechCrunch. While there, he “worked in a wound lab developing a biomask to regenerate human faces for burn victims and war veterans,” he said.
Mom dropped out of school twice — once from Northwestern, and then from Copenhagen Business School — but eventually she hand-stitched the first prototype of the Siren Sock with sensors bought at RadioShack and a leftover Arduino board from a maker fair. “I then paid a tailor in Chinatown to sew my second prototype with multiple sensors and created the first continuous temperature-monitoring socks,” he said.
In 2017, startups TechCrunch has won the hardware battlefield Disrupt the competition. Since then, Siren has raised funding from Khosla Ventures, among others. pulled into $11.8 million in a Series B. It has now added DCM, Founders Fund and Manta Ray Ventures to its cap table, and Mölnlycke is its first strategic investor.
The place is definitely warm, coin a phrase. Competitor Podimetrix raised more than $98 million for its temperature-sensing mat, while Orpyx, which makes pressure-sensing insoles, recently Raised Growth capital is $20 million.