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After studying burn victims and war veterans, entrepreneur Ran Ma developed a sock with sensors to detect leg wounds. Now his company, Sirensecured $9.5 million with an $8 million check from a lead investor Mölnlycke Healthcare further development and adoption of its diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) prevention product. Now, 43 million dollars have been raised to date.
About 830 million people in the world have diabetes, more than a third they can develop debilitating ulcers that can lead to severe complications and, in some cases, amputations throughout their lives.
Siren’s product, the Siren Sock, detects early signs of potential foot injuries by sensing the patient’s foot temperature and detecting hot spots that indicate potential injuries in real time. The company claims it can reduce the risk of DFU by 68% and the risk of amputation by 83% with continuous data collection.
“I studied biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins and Northwestern University,” Ma told TechCrunch. While there, he said, he worked in a wound lab to “create a biomask to restore the human face for burn victims and war veterans.”
Ma dropped out of school twice—once from Northwestern and then from Copenhagen Business School—but eventually she hand-made the first prototype of the Siren sock with sensors she bought from RadioShack and an Arduino board left over from Maker Faire. “I then paid a tailor in Chinaatun to make my second prototype with multiple sensors and created the first continuous temperature monitoring socks,” he said.
Startup in 2017 It won TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield Contest at Disrupt. Since then, Siren has raised funding from Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, DCM, Manta Ray Ventures and Aloft, raising $18 million in Series B. Now it has added Mölnlycke as its first strategic investor.
The space is clearly heating up, in short. Competitor Podimetrics raised more than $98 million for its temperature-sensing mattress, followed by pressure-sensing insole maker Orpyx raised $20 million in growth capital.
