2017 has just come to its end, and it was nothing short of amazing! We first heard about TDJ Pitango Ventures, the Polish-Israeli fund during impact’17 in Kraków. Now, we have some exciting news! They have made their first investment in a Polish startup! 1.5M PLN was awarded to the Poznań-based StethoMe, the makers of the innovative home stethoscope which lets parents quickly and easily monitor their children’s health.
TDJ Pitango Ventures is just starting out in the VC world. However, they have a very solid foundation: they teamed up with Pitango, one of the biggest Israeli VC with over 24 years of experience, and the National Centre for Research and Development. During the next ten years they are planning to invest 210M PLN in tech startups, and thus help build the Polish startup ecosystem. Tomasz Domogała, the owner of TDJ Group, strongly believes Poland can achieve just as much as other countries, where new technologies have been actively supported and developed for years.
The Polish-Israeli VC plan to invest in 20-30 companies from various sectors: Big Data, IoT, SaaS, Enterprise Software, or Digital Health. What’s more important, they have an access to all Pitango’s partners, who can provide their skills, know-how, and a network of contacts, whenever needed. All that to help Polish entrepreneurs go big.
Their first choice is StethoMe, a Poznań-based startup. Their product is a wireless stethoscope that consists only of the chestpiece, which you can use to listen to the heart beat and the lungs. StethoMe also makes a recording and does a simple analysis of the results, thanks to algorithms based on machine learning that interpret the recorded sounds. All the info is displayed on a small screen placed at the back of the device. It can be sent to your doctor via a dedicated app, making for a quicker and more efficient diagnose. No more uncertainty!
“In the USA, a research was carried out on a group of 600 people, analysing doctors’ accuracy in interpreting sounds indicating pneumonia. The average accuracy is only 25%,” says Wojciech Radomski, CEO StethoMe. “This is a very subjective matter. During their studies, medicine students may only deal with only 20 similar cases. As doctors, this number goes up to hundreds. StethoME has a few thousand recordings analysed by experts by now. But to make the device truly accurate, we need tens or hundreds of thousand. And that’s what we’re aiming at.”
Tests have already been carried out in several hospitals and an anechoic chamber, and they prove that the device really does what it claims. StethoMe will help concerned parents and busy doctors. That is why it is such an important device and everyone is working so hard to make it available world-wide. The money the startup obtained will be mostly used to expand to other European markets, and to build a more efficient business model. Clinical studies and certification are next on the list. StethoMe is also patent pending.
We are sure that StethoMe will become a part of any household very soon.
