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10 Medtech Startups to watch in 2021 – Selected

The global medtech market was projected to reach US$ 481.2 billion in 2020. Continuing it’s growth at a CAGR of 5.2% during 2021-2026 it is projected to reach US$ 652.3 billion by 2026.

The largest medtech market is North America with a market share of around 43% in 2018.

Europe follows in second place and makes up 27% of the world market. The biggest markets in Europe are Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.

Here are 10 Medtech Startups to Watch in 2021.


Lalibela Global-Networks

Country: Ethiopia

Year: 2016

Funding Stage: (Information unavailable)

Investors: (Information unavailable)

Description: Lalibela Global-Networks aims to lead the digital transformation of the health sector in Africa. The startup offers healthcare software, including a digital health record system: ABAY-CHR to automate hospital management and reduce day-to-day stationery resources.

Streamlining administrative tasks and reducing time spent finding patient files, Lalibela Global-Networks improves the functionality of medical centers while making healthcare more affordable for patients.

Highlight: Lalibela Global-Networks was the winner of Web Summit’s PITCH startup competition 2020.


XUND

Country: Austria

Year: 2018

Funding Stage: Seed

Investors: TBA Tyrolean Business Angel

Description: XUND is a Vienna based digital health startup developing an AI-powered health assistant designed to improve the quality and accessibility of healthcare. By providing a digital interface between users and the healthcare system, XUND aims to save time, costs and increase the quality of life.

Highlight: PITCH quarter-finalist at Web Summit 2020


Smart Diagnosis

Country: South Korea

Year: 2018

Funding Stage: Early-Stage

Investors: (Information unavailable)

Description: Smart Diagnosis has developed a vital signs extraction algorithm that can analyse the human eye using a smartphone camera for a full patient health assessment.

The Smart Diagnosis app will be accessible on any mobile device anywhere in the world and will also be integrable with other digital healthcare systems.

Highlight: PITCH quarter-finalist at Web Summit 2020


Geneonbiotech

Country: South Korea

Year: (Information unavailable)

Funding Stage: Early-Stage

Investors: (Information unavailable)

Description: Geneonbiotech offers a simple, non-invasive Covid-19 diagnostic solution that greatly reduces time taken to produce a result.

Users provide a saliva sample, rather than a nasal scraping, and are given a result within 45 minutes. Test results are 99 percent accurate, and the system can be used by non-experts.

Geneonbiotech’s testing platform also incorporates a telemedicine communication service to help improve diagnostics and user care.

Highlight: PITCH quarter-finalist at Web Summit 2020


AiDx Medical

Country: Netherlands

Year: 2019

Funding Stage: Pre-Seed

Investors: EIT Health Headstart Fund

Description: AiDx technology brings an affordable alternative to standard microscopic examination by optimally addressing all components of the diagnostic cycle.

Highlight: Winner of Digital Health & Medical Devices category at Hello Tomorrow Summit 2020


TeleMedC

Country: Singapore

Year: 2014

Funding Stage: Early-Stage

Investors: (Information unavailable)

Description: TeleMedC is a diagnostic imaging solutions company using sophisticated retinal imaging.

Their primary objective is to provide low cost diagnostic solutions for point-of-care screening and virtual management of eye and chronic diseases throughout the world.

Highlight: Finalist in Digital Health & Medical Devices at Hello Tomorrow Summit 2020 & ‘Most Investable Startup’ award at Slingshot – Startup Competition of SWITCH 2020


Vibrosonic GmbH

Country: Germany

Year: 2016

Funding Stage: Grant Funding

Investors: EASME – EU Executive Agency for SMEs

Description: Vibrosonic has developed a hearing contact lens which is designed to mimic the natural hearing process to a large extent and thus significantly improve the sound experience of hearing impaired people.

Highlight: Finalist in Digital Health & Medical Devices at Hello Tomorrow Summit 2020 & Spin-off of from the Fraunhofer Project Group


Cirqle Biomedical

Country: Denmark

Year: 2018

Funding Stage: Pre-Seed

Investors: BioInnovation Institute & Rhia Ventures

Description: Circle Devices develops a next generation contraceptive product, which aims to create a natural, desirable and safe alternative to existing contraceptive products.

Highlight: Finalists in Digital Health & Medical Devices at Hello Tomorrow Summit 2020


Nanosynex

Country: Israel

Year: 2017

Funding Stage: Grant Funding

Investors: EASME – EU Executive Agency for SMEs & MassChallenge

Description: Nanosynex is developing a diagnostic test that can check bacterial resistance to antibiotics in a record time using microfluidics techniques, based on a revolutionary scientific development from the Technion.

The test will help doctors determine the most appropriate antibiotic treatment for patients and provide same day results. Same day results will help reduce the spread of resistant bacteria in an environment and significantly lower the burden on healthcare costs.

Highlight: Finalists in Digital Health & Medical Devices at Hello Tomorrow Summit 2020


Cellsway

Country: UK & Turkey

Year: 2020

Funding Stage: Pre-Seed

Investors: (Information unavailable)

Description: Cellsway focuses on the development of microfludics and lab-on-a-chip systems for biomedical applications.

The core product of the company is a liquid biopsy platform which uses a simple blood sample for cancer diagnostics and cancer research.

The patent-pending microfluidic technology enables isolation and enumeration of Circulating Tumor Cells from the blood samples of cancer patients.

Highlight: Finalists in Digital Health & Medical Devices at Hello Tomorrow Summit 2020


Medicsen

Country: Spain

Year: 2015

Funding Stage: Seed

Investors: dotforge, TURN8, Vertical.vc, EASME – EU Executive Agency for SMEs & Hot DesQ

Description: MedicSen’s aim is to launch a treatment that will change the way we deal with diabetes forever.

They have created an application capable of integrating information from continuous glucose meters with other parameters introduced by the user or collected by intelligent devices. The end results offers users a record of their glycemic values and provides a reliable prediction of future values.

MedicSen uses an innovative learning algorithm that communicates with the user through a chat-bot type interface.

Highlight: Winner of Pitch Competition at EU-Startups Summit 2018 & Track Winner of ‘Health & Wellbeing’ at South Summit Competition 2020


If you’ve found this report valuable and if you’re a corporate or investor looking for innovative startups within a specific market, please get in touch.

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Fundraising 4 hours ago

London-based AI laboratory Ineffable Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed on 27 April 2026. The financing is the largest seed round ever raised by a European company and one of the largest first-money-in rounds in the global history of artificial intelligence. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participating investors included Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, the British government’s recently established vehicle for backing strategic AI capacity on home soil. A bet on a different path to general intelligence Ineffable Intelligence was founded in 2025 by David Silver, the former Vice President of Reinforcement Learning at Google DeepMind and the principal architect of AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar. He is joined by three further DeepMind alumni: Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt and Junhyuk Oh. All four have spent the past decade at the frontier of reinforcement learning research, the discipline behind some of the most consequential demonstrations of machine learning over the past ten years. The company describes its objective as building a “superlearner” — an AI system capable of acquiring knowledge directly from its own experience rather than from human-generated text or imagery. “Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement accompanying the launch. “We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.” The framing is a deliberate departure from the dominant industry trajectory. Most leading AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind itself, have built large language models trained primarily on the corpus of the internet, then refined that training with human feedback. Ineffable’s wager is that the marginal returns on scaling text-based pretraining are diminishing and that the next leap in capability will come from agents that learn endlessly from the consequences of their own actions, in much the same way AlphaZero learnt the game of Go without studying any human matches. Why $1.1 billion at seed The size of the round is unusual even by the inflated standards of the 2026 AI capital cycle. Two factors appear to explain it. First, frontier reinforcement learning at the scale Ineffable describes is computationally extraordinarily expensive: the company will need to operate vast simulation environments and train very large models against them, an undertaking that consumes capital at a rate closer to physical R&D than to traditional software. Second, the round signals a strategic move by Europe’s investor and policy ecosystems to retain the most ambitious AI researchers on the continent. The presence of the UK Sovereign AI Fund alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed and Nvidia is the clearest expression of that intent. The British government has publicly framed the investment as a bet on breakthrough AI that “can discover new knowledge”, positioning the country as a willing co-investor in domestic frontier laboratories. For Ineffable, the implication is access not only to capital but to compute, regulatory engagement and the still-resilient academic talent base around UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Founder pledge of historic scale Alongside the funding announcement, Silver disclosed that he is committing 100 per cent of any personal proceeds from his Ineffable equity to charity via the Founders Pledge network — described by the organisation as the largest pledge in its history. At the round’s $5.1 billion valuation, that commitment could ultimately exceed several billion dollars if the company succeeds. It is a meaningful gesture in a sector where the reputational stakes around concentrated AI wealth are escalating, and one likely to be referenced in subsequent founder-led commitments. Implications for the European AI landscape Ineffable’s emergence reshapes the European AI map in three concrete ways. It establishes London as the home of the continent’s largest-ever seed-stage company, complicating Paris’s recent narrative of frontier-AI primacy after Mistral’s earlier rounds. It validates a thesis — that reinforcement learning, not transformer scaling, is the next frontier — that has lately been losing capital share to language-model incumbents. And it confirms that the UK government is now willing to act as a balance-sheet co-investor in domestic AI laboratories, a posture much closer to the French model than to the predominantly grant-based regimes elsewhere in Europe. The execution risk is non-trivial. Reinforcement learning at frontier scale has historically required years of careful environment design before producing competitive systems, and Ineffable’s “first contact” framing sets a high bar against which it will be judged. But for now, with a billion dollars on the balance sheet, four of the discipline’s most accomplished researchers in the founding team and a sovereign co-investor at its back, Ineffable Intelligence is the most heavily resourced new entrant in the European AI cycle. Sesamers covers European fundraising rounds across deeptech, fintech and AI. Source: tech.eu.

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