Cambridge, Mass.-based Quanttus said it brought in $19 million in a Series A funding round from Khosla Ventures and Matrix Partners, following a $3 million seed round from Khosla founder Vinod Khosla.
MIT spinout Quanttus is developing a wearable vital signs monitor designed to measure heart rate, respiration and blood pressure that resembles a wristwatch, according to the MIT Technology Review.
The seed and Series A cash are slated for Quanttus’ work on "breakthroughs in clinical-grade vital signs monitoring and advances in contextual analysis to create wearable technologies that, for the first time, help people proactively understand their bodies and improve their health," according to a press release.
The device, developed by a Dream Team including members from MIT, Nike (NYSE:NKE), Apple (NSDQ:AAPL), Ideo and Mass. General Hospital, the Quanttus system consists of a wearable device designed to capture more than 500,000 vital sign data points each day plus software designed to "translate this data into real-time insights to help people make choices that improve their health," Quanttus said.
"We’re building, basically, a hardware platform; a wearable that sits on your wrist,” Quanttus co-founder & CEO Shahid Azim told the MIT Technology Review recently. “But then there’s an equally large effort around how to make sense, how to generate insights, from this data."
Quanttus has been running validation study at Mass. General since September 2013, aiming to compare its prototype with standard methods for collecting heart rate, respiration and BP data from patients, according to the review. Azim called the early results "very promising," predicting a beta version for app developers early this year, the review reported.
“You’d need at least 3 to 5 different devices today to do all the things we’re doing, which makes it very unique,” Azim told the Boston Business Journal after the Series A round was announced. “We’re not interested in building another Fitbit. … we’re really getting to relevant data, that’s beyond just counting steps and calories.”
Christopher Walker contributed to this report.
