PIUR IMAGING, a medical device company that enables access to affordable high-quality healthcare through AI-driven tomographic 3D ultrasound solutions, today announced the close of its €4.9 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Ascend Capital Partners, an EU Healthtech VC. Aescuvest, a prominent healthcare investment firm from Munich, Germany, joined as a new shareholder investing alongside the lead.
PIUR´s ultrasound solution, PIUR tUS Infinity (“Infinity”) is the only vendor-independent tomographic 3D ultrasound solution on the market. Infinity can extend any regular ultrasound system with a tomography feature that allows volume acquisitions of organs and structures. It can capture large regions of interest in high-resolution 3D volumes and provide clinical applications for semi-automatic data analysis. The separation of image acquisition from image analysis enables AI-based image analysis and asynchronous remote diagnostics, making ultrasound less operator-dependent and more efficient.
“Ultrasound is one of the most important diagnostic imaging tools for certain diseases including vascular, thyroid, abdominal, and cardiac diseases. It is cost-efficient, has no side effects, and is well suited for soft tissue and blood vessel imaging”, explains Frederik Bender, Managing Director & CEO of PIUR IMAGING. “However, ultrasound is a real-time 2D-imaging modality, which relies on a doctor’s capabilities and experience to come up with a diagnosis based on a series of 2D images of three-dimensional organs and structures. Depending on the disease, large inter- and intra-observer variabilities exist, and existing solutions cannot accurately calculate volumetric measurements, only estimations.”
Splitting its latest funding round between R&D spendings, marketing & sales, and partnerships, PIUR will rework and relaunch a major software update and a second-generation sensor that will significantly improve the usability and performance of its device. PIUR will also grow its commercial team and user base, as well as scale its current focus markets Germany, Italy, Spain, and France, and create initial sales in the USA. PIUR has several distribution partnerships with industry leaders in nuclear medicine and ultrasound lined up.
“With tUS Infinity, PIUR IMAGING offers integration of software into newly built hardware from legacy device manufacturers. We see significant advantages of this kind of add-on compared to breakthrough technologies as ultrasound technology is globally accepted and understood. Therefore, the solution is easy to explain, and users can see the benefits right away,” said Sebastian Gührs, Partner & Head of Investment at Aescuvest. “This makes PIUR very interesting from an investor’s perspective: their sleek product meets market demand. The company has also established a sizeable customer base in the DACH region, closed distribution and cooperation agreements with reputable names from the ultrasound space and beyond, and the management team has a clear vision of which indications and geographies it wants to develop the business in,” Gührs concludes.
Founded in 2015, PIUR is planning its expansion to the USA with expected regulatory clearance by the end of the year. It also plans on launching a large collaboration with a leading pharmaceutical company and a leading ultrasound company in the coming months.
