Sano is a San Francisco-based stealthy startup that has just raised $10.25 million in seed round led by True Ventures and Intel Capital, with participation from First Round, Felicis Ventures, Elevation Capital, Floodgate and Rock Health.
The company, which will use the fresh capital to expand its team of 20, is working on a wearable metabolic health tracker that should be released in early 2016. The device will be able to continuously monitor blood glucose level in a completely painless manner, providing benefits for both diabetics and the general audience.
Sano’s device will be able to continuously monitor blood glucose level in a completely painless manner.However, it is still not clear how Sano’s product will do it magic, as the company is reluctant to share any details. Nevertheless, big name investors think Sano is onto something and they are committing serious money to turn this idea into something many users would want to wear.
“Glucose is your body’s fuel, and blood glucose level, or the concentration of the glucose molecule, is an indicator of a lot of things – when is the right time to eat, which foods affect you positively, and how much to eat,” says founder Ashwin Pushpala, who has a background in biomedical engineering. “Our take on the matter is that calories might not be the right metric. At the end of the day, calories can come from a bunch of different things – proteins and fats are good for you in certain scenarios, but they do have a lot of calories – but the most important measure is the concentration of those things in your body.”
Beyond individual use, Sano is looking to get some (big data) numbers that could be used for population health management. The data collected from a bunch of individual responses could be extrapolated to determine the way certain foods or eating habits will affect similar groups of people — in terms of demographic, age, gender and weight.
“We’ll figure it out as we have people using the product, but if we have a large enough dataset it potentially could be used as a predict measure. You walk into Chipotle and see what’s on the menu, and you can look at how other people of your body type responded to those types of foods before you even make a decision,” Pushpala says.
[Via: TechCrunch]