Clair Labs Raises $9M For Its Contact-Free Patient Monitoring Technology

Israeli patient monitoring startup Clair Labs raised $9 million in a seed funding round, the company announced last month. The Israeli venture capital firm 10D led the investment, with participation from SleepScore Ventures, Maniv Mobility, and Vasuki.

Clair Labs has developed proprietary technology to track a patient’s health contact-free by monitoring physiological markers, such as heart rate, respiration, air flow, body temperature, and oxygen saturation, and behavioral markers like sleep patterns and levels of distress. After sensors collect the data, algorithms evaluate what it means and alert the patient or their caregiver.

The funds raised this round will go toward new hiring for the company’s research and development center in Tel Aviv and opening a new office in the United States, which will enable better customer support and sales in North America, Clair Labs indicated.

“The idea for Clair Labs started with a vision of proactive, preventative medicine, which requires health monitoring that integrates into our lives when we are healthy before diseases develop,” said Adi Berenson, CEO of Clair Labs. “As the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, we realized how critical effective and seamless monitoring truly is for care facilities, as well, as they are coping with overwhelming patient capacity and increasing disease rates. Continuous and ongoing patient monitoring will ensure early detection of deterioration or alarming infections. It will help reduce adverse events such as patients falling, pressure ulcers, and more. In the future, contact-free monitoring will enable remote supervision of patients in home hospitalization.”

Berenson co-founded the company with CTO Ran Margolin in 2018. They met while working together in Apple’s product incubation group. Previously, Berenson served as VP Business Development and Marketing at PrimeSense, the 3D sensing technology pioneer, from its early days, through its partnership with Microsoft which resulted in the launch of the Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox, to its acquisition by Apple. Dr. Margolin earned his Ph.D at the Technion, and is a computer vision and machine learning expert, with vast academic and industrial experience including his work in Apple’s research team and in Zoran’s algorithms group.

Their new venture will combine their skills as they utilize new technology to target the remote patient monitoring market. Currently, the company’s prototypes are in clinical trials at two Israeli hospitals: the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center at Ichilov Hospital and the Assuta Sleep Medicine Institute at Assuta Hospital. They plan to start pilots at US hospitals and sleep centers later this year.

“Currently, continuous patient monitoring isn’t available for every patient at internal medicine wards, since the medical teams’ capacity is limited,” said Dr. Ahuva Weiss-Meilik, head of I-Medata AI Center at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. “Technology that can help monitor patients continuously and send smart and early alerts when irregularities are detected can improve the quality of care provided to patients.”