After learning burn victims and battle veterans, entrepreneur Ran Ma hand-made a sock that contained sensors to detect foot ulcers. Now, her firm, Siren, has secured $9.5 million, with an $8 million test from lead investor Mölnlycke Health Care to additional the event and adoption of its diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) prevention product. It’s now raised $43 million thus far.
About 830 million folks worldwide have diabetes, over a 3rd of whom can develop debilitating ulcers of their lifetime, which might result in extreme problems, and even amputations in some circumstances.
Siren’s product, Siren Socks, detects early indicators of potential foot accidents by sensing a affected person’s foot temperature and detecting hotspots that point out potential ulcers in real-time. The firm claims it will probably cut back the chance of DFUs by as much as 68% and amputations by 83% by accumulating information repeatedly.
“I studied biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins and at Northwestern University,” Ma instructed TechCrunch. While there, she labored at a wound lab to “create a biomask to regenerate the human face for burn victims and battle veterans,” she stated.
Ma dropped out of college twice — as soon as from Northwestern, after which from Copenhagen Business School — however ultimately she hand-sewed the primary prototype of the Siren sock with sensors she’d purchased from RadioShack and a leftover Arduino board from Maker Faire. “I then paid a tailor in Chinatown to stitch my second prototype with a number of sensors and created the primary steady temperature-monitoring socks,” she stated.
In 2017, the startup gained TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield contest at Disrupt. Since then, Siren has raised funding from Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, DCM, Manta Ray Ventures, and Aloft amongst others, pulling in $18 million in a Series B. It has now added Mölnlycke as its first strategic investor.
The house is clearly warming up, to coin a phrase. Competitor Podimetrics has raised over $98 million for its temperature-sensing mat, whereas Orpyx, which makes a pressure-sensing insole, just lately raised $20 million in progress capital.
