Six out of ten Americans live with a chronic disease, but patients do not always have access to affordable and convenient health testing, and there are still limitations to current testing methods.SiPhox Health intends to change this by bringing lab-quality health testing devices to every residence using silicon photonic chip technology for more sophisticated blood testing. This semiconductor technology revolutionized internet connectivity.
Diedrick Vermeulen and Michael Dubrovsky established the company in 2020 while participating in the summer cohort of Y Combinator. Creating a circuit board for optical chips, the Burlington, Massachusetts-based company intended to replace refrigerator-sized diagnostic devices with a tiny chip at the time. Its first product was a $1 COVID-19 test cartridge that was disposable.
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According to CEO Vermeulen, other at-home blood testing technologies focused on less expensive paper strips and other collection methods rather than the testing device. Instead, SiPhox Health started with the costlier component, the laboratory instrument.
“Our approach is to miniaturize all of the components onto silicon chips,” he told TechCrunch. “Silicon photonics technology leaves the instrument completely untouched, so we inherit all the functionality, multiplexing capability, sensitivity, and so on, and bring that to the consumer.”
And, instead of relying on a single blood test per year to evaluate a person’s health, SiPhox Health enables patients and their physicians to obtain a large number of data points to aid in making real-time health decisions.
The company provides a test instrument and a panel of seventeen biomarkers in the areas of inflammation, cardiovascular health, metabolic fitness, and hormone balance. The cost of subscription-based kits is $95, with a monthly membership charge of $16 that includes access to continuous glucose monitors and personalized biohacking instruments.
Currently, testing is performed using mail-in samples and conventional methods. In an interview, Dubrovsky stated that the company is developing a home-based device, but it is not yet available. According to the company, the subscription price of its future offering, which will include the SiPhox Home product, will be less than $100 per month.
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Within the next year, SiPhox Health hopes to have the SiPhox Home product approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In less than five minutes, the platform will provide finger-prick blood assays for proteins and hormones. The company is preparing to conduct a case study on this topic with thousands of participants.
The market for diagnostics has shifted significantly toward at-home testing, driven by companies such as Everlywell and supplemented by startups from around the world, such as Oova, Simple HealthKit, Senzo, Healthtracka, TBD Health, Starling Medical, and Hormona, which have attracted venture capital interest in recent years.
A $27 million funding round, comprised of $10 million in seed funding and $17 million in Series A funding, is also supporting the work of SiPhox Health. Recent Series A funding was led by Intel Capital, with additional participation from Khosla Ventures, Kortex Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Metaplanet, Shorewind Capital, LongeVC, Overlap Holdings, and Duke Capital Partners.
Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator led the inaugural investment, with participation from Metaplanet, the Massachusetts Manufacturing Innovation Initiative, Rsquared, Vituity, Paul Buchheit, Balaji Srinivasan, Bob Lee, and the Longevity Tech Fund.
The Series A funding will also enable SiPhox Health to hire an additional thirty biologists, scientists, engineers, and mechanical engineers and to expand its current business offerings.
Dubrovsky stated, “Since we first began to learn about the market and blood testing, we have grown exponentially.” Along with mental health and cardiovascular conditions, at least one of these categories is present in 20% of our tests.
Intel Capital remains an active corporate venture capital firm, having invested in Figure earlier this week, MatrixSpace, an AI-enabled sensing technology company, and Alkymi, a data workflow automation company.
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As a result of the investment, Srini Ananth, managing director of Intel Capital, will join the board of directors of SiPhox Health.
“The rapid growth of the telehealth and home health industries calls for a new diagnostic paradigm. Ananth stated in a written statement that rapid and accurate at-home testing by SiPhox Health is poised to change the patient journey for employers, pharma, insurers, and health systems. During the past two decades, investments in silicon photonics by the datacom and telecom industries have enabled the massive proliferation of the internet and cloud computing.
This has enabled companies like SiPhox to implement silicon photonics technology in uncharted territories. We are incredibly impressed by their technology and approach to this opportunity.”
