When VC-investments go hand-in-hand with public funding

CathVision is a Danish medical device company working to cure the most common heart problem, cardiac arrhythmia. The most widespread cardiac arrhythmia condition is called atrial fibrillation. This condition causes irregular and rapid heart rate and increases the risk of strokes, heart failure and other heart-related complications. Atrial fibrillation affects 20 million people in the EU and US and poses an economic burden of 447B DKK/year on the healthcare systems.

Today symptoms can be treated with medicine, but the only cure is a procedure called ablation therapy. That procedure requires up to 20 years of experience for a doctor to be able to perform, because of the immature technology involved. Thus, the procedure is unavailable to most patients resulting in as much as 287.000 deaths annually.

CathVision is working to solve this by developing a super-low noise electrophysiology (EP) recording system, the CathVision Cube, to help better guide ablation therapy through exceptional EP signal quality. So far, this mission has gotten them a 100 mil. DKK venture-investment.

VC-investments for clinical trials, public grants for technical development

In May 2020 CathVision received a VC-investment of 100 mil. DKK to carry out clinical trials and get FDA approval. In order to mitigate the risks associated with development of the software for the device, CathVision saw an advantage with Innovation Fund Denmarks grants.

The first Innobooster project for CathVision developed a clinical decision-support functionality
for physicians. This software enhances the usage of the CathVision Cube EP system by drastically improving the precision in localizing the diseased areas in the heart.

The second project developed an algorithmic layer on top of the Version 1 CathVision Cube EP system. This allows less specialized physicians to perform ablation therapy successfully, which will increase the number of procedures to be performed by at least 10x.

“It has been a pleasure working with Teknologiudvikling. They offer accurate advice, and they have a great track record with Innobooster and CathVision. I recommend engaging Teknologiudvikling for grant support,” - Mads Matthiesen, CEO at CathVision.

In collaboration with Teknologiudvikling, CathVision has been awarded over 5.2M DKK for two projects from the Innobooster programme.