Surge, a biotech and medical AI startup, announced on September 22 a €2.5 million fundraising round led by HCVC, a Franco-American early-stage fund dedicated to high-potential technology startups, and Boutique Venture Partners, an American fund from Silicon Valley. Experienced business angels, including Nicolas Godin, COO/CFO of Cardiologs, also participated in the round. The medtech has also received grants, including the iLab 2022 grant, of which it was the winner.

Approximately 700,000 abdominal surgeries are performed each year in France, 5.1 million in Europe and 6.1 million in the US. Nearly 30% of these surgeries result in postoperative complications such as infections, cognitive decline or thrombo-embolic events. These complications, deteriorating the health status of patients, usually require additional care or re-hospitalization, resulting in high health care costs.

Predicting the risk of postoperative complications

Based in Paris and San Franscisco, Surge is a French start-up founded in August 2021 by doctors and engineers from Ecole Polytechnique, Sorbonne University and Stanford University. Hosted in the United States by StartX, a non-profit community of founders, it is hosted in France by the Agoranov incubator and supported by the 50 Partners gas pedal, LallianSe and Wilco.

Surge’s flagship product uses innovative ML algorithms to decode a patient’s immune system from a blood sample. This technology allows physicians to quickly predict the risk of post-surgical complications and implement targeted, personalized interventions to reduce the risk of post-surgical complications in patients.

A patented solution

Developed between the United States and France, Surge’s technology combines a biological analysis of the immune system with an AI algorithm, it is capable of calculating the risk of surgical complications for each patient and proposing personalized preventive management strategies to optimize the care pathway.

A multi-year collaboration, an exclusive license and a research agreement

Surge has exclusively licensed patented postoperative complication prediction technology from Stanford University, developed through more than a decade of surgical risk prediction research led by Brice Gaudillière, MD, PhD, a physician, researcher and associate professor of anesthesiology, perioperative medicine and pain medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.

This summer, Surge strengthened its relationship with Stanford University with the signing of a research agreement to develop biotechnology innovations.

The funding will allow Surge to further develop its team to accelerate product development and conduct clinical studies with other hospitals, such as the one launched in the spring of 2022 with the Foch Hospital in Suresnes, France. The Foch study, launched in spring 2022, aims to validate Surge’s prediction of surgical site infections in abdominal surgery.

Julien Hédou, co-founder and President of Surge, working at the Brice Gaudillière Laboratory at Stanford, concludes:

“Our ambition is to develop the reference solution for surgical precision medicine. We intend to expand and diversify the applications of our technology with immune profiling tools for all surgical complications. Eventually, we also want to apply our methodology to other therapeutic areas.

Translated from La medtech Surge annonce une levée de fonds de 2,5 millions d’euros et une licence exclusive avec l’Université de Stanford