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Today's traditional methods to monitor life functions are time-consuming and expensive, significantly damaging nursing staff and hospitals. smedo’s solution, however, offers an efficient, affordable, and automated method of tracking heartbeat, heart rate variability, heart sound, respiration rate, and even blood pressure, in the future, leading the way toward a more efficient healthcare environment.

The founder and CEO of the company is Thomas Grellner, a serial entrepreneur, with over 30 years of experience in the tech industry. Thomas spoke with SeedBlink about the company’s vision, innovative technology, and plans for the future.

1. You have a long history of entrepreneurship, with many successful projects in your background. What inspired you to start smedo?

I came across the idea when I met another startup company a couple of years ago. That company claimed to read vital signs using radar. Imagining contactless monitoring of patients in their hospital beds, elderly people in care facilities or maybe even people in their living environments made me curious about that technology. I approached that startup for a license to sell their product in German-speaking countries, however, they were unable to deliver at the time. So, I started smedo to turn this vision into reality.

2. How does smedo’s AI-driven contactless technology work, and what makes it unique?

Our technology works similarly to those distance sensors you might know from your car, which help with maintaining a safe distance to the car right in front of you, or with parking. However, we’ve added a twist to this kind of distance measuring. We focus on very small changes in the distance between our sensor and the human body.

To be precise, we are looking at the micro-vibrations in the skin of the test person. These micro-vibrations deliver the information that we feed to our AI model. And voila, the AI model calculates the heart rate and respiration rate, while constantly checking for changes and the reliability of the measurement itself, which is what we call signal quality index.

3. What are the main advantages of smedo’s solution compared to the traditional health monitoring systems?

Our solution works contactless. This means no wires, no patches, nothing that touches the patient or test person. The device that allows us to perform this kind of monitoring is mounted directly under the mattress of the hospital or care bed, making monitoring completely unobtrusive. Healthcare professionals don’t need to interact with the device, and the solution provides accurate 24/7 vital sign monitoring with fully automated documentation. We think this improves efficiency, reduces workload for nurses, saving precious time.

More importantly, our technology has the potential to save lives by continuously tracking vital signs, and detecting changes in a patient’s condition early, enabling faster interventions. showing the change in the patient’s health situation.

4. How does smedo’s business model differ for B2B clients versus direct consumers, for home care?

smedo’s business model is B2B only. Our primary focus is hospitals, equipping beds that currently lack automated monitoring. In today’s world, we are talking about 90% of all hospital beds, outside ICUs, and stroke units that are usually well equipped with wired monitoring systems. Furthermore, we will also target elderly care units, where our technology can greatly ease caregiving tasks.

At a later point in time, we plan to expand to assisted living solutions, while still focusing on care-related applications. This might imply a slightly different sales approach, depending on the insurance systems of the different countries.

5. The health-tech market is rapidly evolving. How do you see the future of AI-powered health monitoring?

AI will be the driving force in the next generation of health monitoring. AI gives us a whole new way of insights into monitored data.

It is not only about bringing health monitoring to a whole new level in terms of more data and even more precise data but, I think this is key, adding value in respect of hinting to significant changes in the health conditions of patients. Our team at smedo is already preparing to provide pre-diagnostic insight from the data in the future. This will make a huge difference for possibly earlier and therefore eventually more effective therapies.

6. How did you secure early funding for the company?

When I decided to build the radar solution with my team, I quickly realized that self-funding was not an option. So, we started looking for public and private funding as well. Attracting an investor with just the idea of a completely new kind of technology for measuring vital signs did not work out in the beginning.

However, as we were able to demonstrate that the technology works and that we can add public funding for the research part of the product development, we were able to get APEX Ventures and Brandenburg Kapital.

7. What are the next big milestones for smedo?

The next big milestone is the certification of our solution as a medical device, allowing us to launch the product in Europe. Once we secure certification, we’ll move forward to our next major step, which is raising our next equity round to scale operations.

8. For investors, why is now the right time to support smedo?

There are plenty of reasons, and the short answer is that smedo is at the right place at the right time. The growing demand for scalable, efficient healthcare solutions is undeniable, driven by aging populations, rising chronic diseases, and medical staff shortages.

Our contactless monitoring technology addresses these challenges head-on, reducing caregiver workload while improving patient outcomes. With regulatory support increasing for remote monitoring and a $100 billion+ market opportunity by 2030, we are positioned for rapid growth.

Unlike traditional systems, smedo delivers real-time, contact-free data, setting us apart from competitors. Backed by a scalable business model and SaaS-enabled revenue streams, now is the ideal moment to invest before our next growth phase.

Explore the opportunity on SeedBlink.