As temperatures rise, sweat becomes unavoidable. It appears when temperatures rise, after a workout or simply when the body needs to regulate its temperature. But this natural response, which is usually seen simply as a sign of exertion or fatigue, contains far more valuable information than it might seem at first glance: every drop of sweat contains small clues about what is happening inside the body.
This intuition led Elisabet del Valle and Xavier Muñoz to found Onalabs in Barcelona a decade ago. Since then, the deep-tech company has spent the past decade developing of sensors and devices capable of reading the signals contained in a fluid as common as sweat and converting them into useful data to understand a person's physical state and detect possible changes in their health.
After a decade of research, development and testing of these sensors, Onalabs now faces a new stage: scaling up its technology that is already reaching the market and expanding its scope, both in the sports and healthcare fields. To boost this new stage, the Barcelona-based company has closed a financing round of more than 9.3 million euros.
The round was backed by Sociedad Española para la Transformación Tecnológica (SETT), the State's public technological investment vehicle, which through the Next Tech instrument has invested 4.6 million euros in Onalabs, almost half of the more than 9.3 million raised in the operation. The remaining funding came from 1921 Ventures, an Austrian fund specialized in diabetes; nPrime, an investment fund based in Singapore; and existing investors of the company such as Reig Patrimonia and WA4STEAM.
“This round represents much more than a capital injection. It is the recognition of years of research, development and validation,” says Elisabet del Valle, co-founder and CEO of Onalabs. The investment will allow the company to expand the manufacturing capacity of its sensors and devices, as well as continue the clinical validation of its healthcare solutions, with potential applications in the monitoring of chronic diseases such as diabetes.
Sweat as a data source: from training to the hospital
The latest funding round marks a new chapter in Onalabs' growth. Since its foundation, the company has been raising the funding needed to develop a technology that has required years of research and validation. In 2022, it closed a seed round of 1.5 million euros; a year later, it raised another 1.8 million, an operation that also involved FC Barcelona as a strategic partner. This has now been followed by a new €9.3 million round. In parallel, it has also obtained more than 4 million euros in competitive public aid from Catalan, state, and European programs.
Thanks to this capital and after a decade of development, Onalabs' technology has already begun to leave the laboratories. The first product is ONASPORT, a device that converts sweat into data on sports performance. The system analyzes biomarkers such as lactate, dehydration, heart rate, electrolyte loss, or sodium, information that helps athletes and coaches understand how the body responds to exercise, adjust training, and reduce the risk of injuries or underperformance due to poor hydration. Furthermore, unlike traditional systems, the sensor allows these data to be obtained continuously and in real-time throughout the training, where previously most could only be known with specific tests before or after physical activity.
But the company's vision goes beyond sports performance. The next big challenge is to apply this continuous monitoring capability to healthcare. With its ONAVITAL technology, currently undergoing clinical and regulatory validation, the Barcelona-based company is developing a device designed so that patients can be monitored remotely and continuously, without requiring hospital admission. The device turns the skin into a data platform capable of recording in real-time vital signs such as blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, or body temperature. This would allow healthcare professionals to have more information about the evolution of patients and detect possible alterations more quickly.
In parallel, Onalabs is also working on ONADM, a biosensor still under development that aims to enable continuous, non-invasive monitoring of blood glucose levels through sweat. The goal is to avoid the finger pricks that many people with diabetes still need to do several times a day to monitor their blood glucose levels.
“For a deep tech company like Onalabs, developing disruptive technology requires time, talent, and sustained commitment," says Del Valle. The CEO of OnaLabs argues that investor confidence will allow the company "to speed up the path from innovation to market".
With about thirty professionals, six patents, and pilot projects involving more than a dozen hospitals, Onalabs now faces a new stage: to demonstrate that a technology born in Barcelona and developed over a decade can become part of the everyday lives of patients and athletes. If this goal materializes, sweat could be more than just the body's natural response to heat or effort to become a new tool for monitoring health and physical performance.