How can we improve the management of skin wounds and their follow-up? This is the question that the young start-up Pixacare has addressed. Its skin pathology monitoring platform, deployed in more than ten hospitals in France, supports more than 14,000 patients. The start-up from the Grand Est region announced today that it has raised €1.950 million, led by SAAS Partners, with the participation of Techmind and business angels.
It all started in early 2019 for Pixacare. Frédéric Bodin, professor of plastic surgery specializing in wound and scarring, Vincent Marceddu, engineer graduated from CNAM, ex-Microsoft and Matis Ringdal, entrepreneur graduated from Polytechnique and UC Berkeley, meet at the Hacking Health Camp 2018, the desire and determination are there. The company was created in April 2019 at SEMIA, a public incubator in the Grand Est region of France, and by 2020, the young start-up had landed its first hospital clients.
Pixacare’s solution allowed them to be a winner of the I-Lab 2021 competition organized by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. The start-up is a product of the University of Strasbourg and the SATT Conectus, Pixacare is also incubated at TechCare (Paris&Co) and accelerated by 50 Partners and Scal’E Nov.
Improving wound care
Skin pathologies, particularly chronic wounds, are extremely common clinical situations. For example, pressure sores, which develop mainly in bedridden elderly people, affect between 2 and 3 million people per year in France.
These chronic wounds represent a major financial challenge for the healthcare system: 3 billion per year for the French social security system, and 30 billion per year in the United States.
Standardized monitoring and documentation of these wounds not only allows for more effective collaboration between caregivers, but also for earlier detection of complications, not to mention the fact that frail people do not have to travel.
In concrete terms, the software allows caregivers to take photos of wounds with a dedicated and secure application, preventing images of patients from ending up in the personal photo gallery of their phones. In addition, the tool enables communication between city and hospital caregivers around this care, with enriched visual information on the evolution of the lesion. Finally, users can generate a healing report and integrate it into the computerized patient file.
“Our algorithms analyze the wound using a patented colorimetric and centimetric marker. The caregiver places the marker on the skin adjacent to the wound and retrieves the key information in a few moments,” says Vincent Marceddu, CTO and co-founder.
“COVID revealed to us the need to use remote monitoring tools for chronic wounds. Pixacare is an effective and easy-to-use tool for this purpose, which allows for easy deployment via its lightweight smartphone client and access via QR Code. It thus facilitates and improves the follow-up of these often elderly patients. The decision support tools are going in the same direction, in order to make the management of these patients, which is still too often erratic, more reliable. Guillaume Maxant, head of the vascular surgery department at the Haguenau Hospital, Pixacare user.
Fundraising for commercial development
Two years after its creation, Pixacare completes a first round of financing of €1.950 million with SAAS Partners, Techmind, several experts in digital health and the dressing industry, and with the support of BPI France.
This fundraising will allow the recruitment of 6 people, the acceleration of commercial development and the obtaining of the necessary clinical validations for medical devices.
“This round of funding will allow us to bring to market a competitive and soon to be clinically validated product, with the ambition of becoming a global reference in skin pathology monitoring aid” Matis Ringdal, CEO of Pixacare.
“What attracted us to Pixacare was both a team of passionate people, who are very complementary and have been working efficiently on the project for two years, and a product that transforms the mobile phone into a medical device. This is to address both an operational problem felt by caregivers and a revenue shortfall for hospitals and social security.” Justin Ziegler, President of SAAS Partners.
“We are proud to support this ambitious and very complementary team. Thanks to its technology, Pixacare addresses a real problem faced by surgeons, doctors and nurses in the treatment of wounds, and its development prospects in France and internationally seem very important to us. The team has already shown a very good quality of execution and we will continue to support it, alongside SAAS Partners and leading private investors in the healthcare sector, to consolidate its leadership in the market. Olivier Tilloy, General Partner at Techmind.
Translated from Santé : Pixacare, spécialiste en suivi des pathologies cutanées lève 1,950 millions d’euros
