Sycai Medical looks to the United States. The technological startup has closed its second investment round for three million euros. The funds raised will help it further its medical software to locate lesions in the abdomen, currently focused on the pancreas, with one of the most deadly cancers due to its late detection.
The company has added investors such as LUMO Labs and Namarel Ventures, in addition to revalidating the support of Ship2B Ventures, through its BSocial Impact Fund ---supported by Banco Sabadell, the European Investment Fund and Axis--- and Athos Capital. "This round marks an important milestone at a very strategic moment in the evolution of the startup. We are currently transitioning from a product-centric organization to a business-centric organization," summarizes Sycai's CEO and co-founder, Sara Toledano.
It all started in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. At that time, the company was called Sycai Technologies and had begun to develop its technology for sectors such as energy and agriculture. The origin was in the doctorate from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) of one of the co-founders, Javier García. Faced with so many initiatives seeking to prevent covid contagion, the company began meeting with doctors to see how they could help them with their artificial vision and big data device, and applied it to chest X-rays to detect the disease.
But, among so many meetings, via Teams, as one of its co-founders, Júlia Rodríguez Comas, points out, they saw that their technology could be more useful in another field. With healthcare professionals, they realized that abdominal lesions were very difficult to detect, a problem for radiologists but also for gastroenterologists. It was at that moment that Sycai Technologies changed its name to Sycai Medical.
The first prototype of their software was ready in September 2020. Little by little, the algorithm has been improved, fed with thousands of CT scans to be able to locate lesions in this area of the body where there are many organs, they are tight and overlap. The first CT scans were obtained from centers such as Hospital de Mataró, Sant Pau or Vall d'Hebron. They have also drawn from public repositories.
One of the innovations presented by Sycai's solution is that it integrates into hospital systems and reviews all medical imaging tests that are performed, whether a lesion is being sought in the abdomen or for another reason, thus facilitating its detection. For example, a patient's CT scan is also reviewed in the oncological follow-up of prostate cancer. Likewise, the software is capable of seeing malignant lesions, but also benign and premalignant ones, providing a global vision and alerting with margin.
The round will also help them extend their software to organs such as the kidney and liverThe clinical trial of their technological device was conducted at Parc Taulí de Sabadell between 2022 and 2023. They dedicated themselves to analyzing previously performed CT scans to see how their software worked. The focus was on the pancreas, with a very deadly cancer because it does not cause symptoms until it is too late, with an average survival of five months.They studied the records of more than 400 patients and concluded that the Sycai device made good prognoses, in addition to being easy to use.
With the results on the table, it obtained approval for its commercialization in European hospitals in mid-last year. Since then, it has reached some hospitals in Spain and Italy, with the goal now of expanding the number of centers and markets in which it is present in Europe. The resources raised by the round must also serve to extend the use of its software to more organs present in the upper abdomen, such as the kidney and liver.
Sycai Medical's workforce stands at 12 employees. The forecast is to grow to twenty by 2026, especially with profiles focused on commercial and expansion tasks. Until now, it had raised about two million euros, coming from both its first round (780,000 euros) and public and private funds. Incubated by Barcelona Activa, the startup is located in one of its headquarters in 22@.