Birkeland Current's Sovrinti Selected by Health Wildcatters

Health Wildcatters Announces It’s Adding Ten New Startups to Its Portfolio (DALLAS,TX) -- Today Dallas-based seed accelerator, Health Wildcatters announced the nationally ranked program has added ten new startups to its portfolio, bringing the number of startups under Health Wildcatters’ umbrella to 88. This is the accelerators’ ninth cohort of startups. Since 2013, Health Wildcatters has become a mainstay in the North Texas healthcare and entrepreneurial innovation community. “This year we are welcoming teams hailing from Germany, Italy, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Illinois, California, Washington and Texas”, said Hubert Zajicek, CEO of Health Wildcatters. “The ten startups are led by a diverse group of entrepreneurs with roots in five continents, with half led by female founders. I couldn’t be more excited to introduce such a diverse and capable set of entrepreneurs to DFW”, said he.

● A LaRue Company (Winston-Salem, NC) – Designer of the LaRue Surgical Evacuator and Clean Removal Process to aid surgeons in providing patients a safe, rapid, less invasive procedure for removing gelatinous and similar materials from the body or surgical site.

● Aliform (Aachen, Germany) – Developing minimally-invasive surgical devices for treating skin conditions.

● AllergenIQ (Southlake, TX)– Digital health telemedicine platform that provides comprehensive integrative care, support, and treatment for children who have allergic conditions including food allergies.

● Birkeland Current - SOVRINTI (Waco, TX) – Changing the future of independent aging and home-based care by scaling senior functional assessment to support earlier clinical diagnosis, person-centered home care, and timely care interventions.

● Oral Genome (Carlsbad, CA) – Send in your saliva and receive personalized insights about your oral health and recommended preventative measures.

● Parrots Inc. (Seattle, WA) – Creator of “Polly”, an inclusive platform using AI and machine learning to give a smart voice and telecare to people with neurological disorders.

● RECORNEA (Udine, Italy) – is a pre-clinical stage medtech ophthalmic company developing therapeutic corneal implants.

● Lung Healing Technologies, Inc. (Winnetka, IL) – SmartDrain monitors the CO2, O2, and pressure in a chest drain to reduce hospitalization costs by over $4k per patient or $1B per year in the US alone.

● Spectryx (Palo Alto, CA) – Transforming the drug development industry with high-throughput, label-free, ultra-sensitive automated sensors.

● Sympal (Boston, MA) – Clear aligner company disrupting the orthodontic industry.

For more information visit healthwildcatters.com About Health Wildcatters Health Wildcatters is a top-ranked seed accelerator based in Dallas, TX. Exclusively focused on healthcare, Health Wildcatters has 88 portfolio companies and has raised collectively over $200 million across the last eight years. To learn more about Health Wildcatters visit www.healthwildcatters.com .

Local Company Awarded NSF grant to productize direct to cellular telemedicine devices

WACO, Texas, Apr. 20, 2021 – Birkeland Current, a pioneer in wireless sensing technologies, announced today that it was awarded a National Science Foundation SBIR Phase I grant for its innovative Auto Pairing Direct-to-Cellular Telehealth Gateway designed to streamline and simplify communicating home health measurements to medical providers.

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak Birkeland Current with partner firms OneCare and  I-Health Labs, had created an initial prototype device to replace the typical smart phone or tablet interface with a low cost auto-pairing direct-to-cellular gateway.

Dubbed “the Gateway”, this small, plug-in device wirelessly connects your health measurement devices to the assigned medical organization. Doing so removes smart phone or tablet interfaces required to provide the physician with ongoing medical updates. This technology would also effectively eliminate the training, confusion, and ongoing customer service issues seen in the elderly and at-risk populations.

Current systems heavily rely upon user interaction that requires account setup and access as well as cumbersome measurement and submissions for each health reading.  This currently challenging and potentially error prone interface would be replaced with a single device requiring no set up or direct interaction with the user. The proposed approach greatly simplifies and streamlines the disease-related measurements while also reducing the time and cost of getting devices provisioned and into the end user’s hands. It also provides COVID-19 diagnosed patients the capability to effectively monitor symptoms from home resulting in improved health tracking while reducing hospital demand, disease spread, and system costs. The program Principal Investigator Mr. Fitch stated “The overall goal is to improve a seniors adherence to a physicians home care plan by letting the technology, not the senior, do most of the work.”

Collecting time-sensitive data from at-risk populations such as seniors, economically disadvantaged, or rural populations, requires turn-key solutions that avoid ancillary data access requirements. The proposed solution takes full advantage of ubiquitous direct-to-cellular capability to accomplish the broader health monitoring goals. 

About Birkeland Current

Birkeland Current is a small, wireless sensing technology R&D company with the express purpose of launching disruptive products and business models.  All ventures share a novel combination of sensors, edge computing. innovative data analytics and customer insight.  Birkeland Current's latest project, a smart home sensing system for home-based health care, was awarded a $4.2 million NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Fast Track grant to demonstrate the effectiveness of machine learning to assess daily function of persons with mild cognitive decline.  The company is located in Waco, Texas in the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC). 

About the NSF’s Small Business Programs

America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards $200 million annually to startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost all areas of science and technology can receive up to $2 million to support research and development (R&D), helping de-risk technology for commercial success. America’ Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $8.5 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. For more information, visit seedfund.nsf.gov.