Reading The Room: Norbert Health Raises $5M Seed II For Contactless Vital Signs

Vital signs are a critical component for patients undergoing procedures and as they heal at home. Norbert Health landed $5 million in Seed II funding to continue developing its contactless vital sign scanning technology.

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The round was co-led by Serena Capital and HCVC, with Exor, C4 Ventures, LDV Capital and Newlab joining in. The new investment brings Brooklyn-based Norbert’s total funding to $8 million, according to Alexandre Winter, the company’s co-founder and CEO. Winter founded the company in 2019, which, in addition to New York, has a presence in San Francisco and Paris.

“Today, no vital signs work without contact, and we will enable passive monitoring,” Winter told Crunchbase News. “This is important because health care workers can be more efficient and detect problems as they occur. Instead of taking 10 minutes to take all of the vital signs, the health care worker can be talking to the patient about how they are feeling.”

Norbert is accepting pre-orders for its first product that uses wireless sensing technology via an ambient scanner that can safely measure vital signs — such as temperature and cardiac and respiratory activity — in a few seconds on anyone within a 6-foot range.

Businesses can place the scanners throughout their spaces, and Norbert will automatically notify staff when a high temperature is indicated. Hospitals and care centers will be able to use the scanner for automated check-in, in-room vital sign monitoring, and post-discharge patient monitoring.

When Norbert raised its initial seed round in 2019, it built its prototype and demonstrated its technology. This time around, Winter intends to use the new funding to build tens of thousands of devices, integrate advanced features, expand the team, get through medical certification, and demonstrate go-to-market.

“We can then get to our next round, the Series A, with a scalable device,” he added.

The company has deployed 50 devices, with its first use cases involving return-to-work applications, and have recorded more than 1 million vital sign scans, according to Norbert COO Patrick Collins.

Next up, Norbert is working to get its devices into a variety of places, generate a lot of data, and understand vital signs to the point where the scanners can eventually predict problems and early signs of disease, Winter said.

Meanwhile, Alexis Houssou, founder and managing partner of HCVC, said he has known Winter for a few years and sees him as “one of the pioneers of AI and computer vision.” The firm invested in Norbert Health because of the potential for its technology to detect and diagnose illnesses better and earlier.

“You can seamlessly and remotely put a scanner in the emergency room or nursing home without having a nurse come in as often, but with the vision of monitoring 24/7,” Houssou said. “You can also put the device in someone’s home and know if they are doing OK. In the future, we are going to discover new ways to diagnose all problems early by looking at various data, in one device, at the same time.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman