NEW YORK – DeepUll said on Thursday that it raised €13 million ($12.7 million) in Series B financing. Based in Barcelona, DeepUll raised €3.5 million in July 2020 and is developing a culture-free system for guiding treatment selection for sepsis patients.
"This financing will allow us to ramp up our efforts to bring our first-in-class sepsis recognition platform to market," CEO Jordi Carrera said in a statement. Carrera added that existing tests for diagnosing sepsis and informing treatment decisions are "woefully inadequate."
Existing investors Kurma Partners and UI Investissement, both based in Paris, and Alta Life Sciences, based in Barcelona and Madrid, contributed to the Series B round, as did Innvierte, a program overseen by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and another investor that DeepUll did not name.
DeepUll was founded two years ago by Carrera and Rafel Bru, the cofounders of Stat-Dx. That company offered a multiplex platform for infectious disease testing and was acquired by Qiagen in 2018 for $191 million.
DeepUll's focus is on developing culture-free diagnostics for sepsis and acute infections. The company said its product is designed to detect more than 250 pathogens and 15 resistance genes within an hour, and that the analysis is run on 10 mL of whole blood. The company's desktop system will then generate a phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility report in about eight hours, without requiring a positive blood culture. The company said its product relies on artificial intelligence to guide medical decision making. DeepUll noted that it intends to place its systems in laboratories and intensive care units.