Singapore-based StratifiCare™ Pte Ltd, an innovative medical diagnostic solutions company, plans to raise $12 million in a pre-Series A round, its top executive said.

“We are currently doing a $12 million Pre-Series A round. The raise will fund our operations for our next 24 months to develop new products and bring our current two products to market,” StratifiCare Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Anthony Chua told TechNode Global in a recent interview. “We are in talks with our earlier investors.”

The Pre-Series A funding round comes after its Seed round in October last year. StratifiCare has secured close to S$1 million ($734,634) in an oversubscribed Seed round from investors including Asian Development Bank Ventures, Sprout, PatSnap CEO Jeffrey Tiong, and Carousell CEO Quek Siu Rui. The funds mainly go towards setting up pilot production facilities and supporting clinical trials for StratifiDen™ in Dengue-impacted countries in Asia.

StratifiDen is the world’s first severe Dengue prediction test in advanced development at StratifiCare, aimed at helping doctors decide which Dengue patients are at risk of developing severe disease complications (such as severe internal bleeding) and require hospitalization.

Another product, StratifiREY, is a solution which can help medical professionals in treating certain liver cancer. It is an immune-profiling companion diagnostic test that uses a panel of white blood cells as biomarkers to determine a patient’s response to Y90 Radioembolization (RE). Y90 Radioembolization (RE) is one of the treatment option for unresectable Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of liver cancer.

In the interview, Chua also shared that MedTech startups in the region often face difficulties in raising funds.

The long gestation period, the need to obtain regulatory approvals for MedTech products are among the reasons why it is difficult for MedTech startups to secure funding.

“For [most] tech startups, with a minimum viable product (MVP) or with certain monthly active users, they can raise funds from investors. For MedTech startups, we will only be able to raise funds after our products get regulatory approvals,” he said.

MedTech investors in Southeast Asia are generally more risk-averse unlike the ones in Europe and the US, he said.

Stratificare, a spinoff from the National University of Singapore (NUS), said it has more than 50 years of in-depth experience in Biomedical R&D and technology commercialization, focusing on developing next-generation in vitro diagnostic (IVD) solutions. It has the internal know-how on identifying new biomarkers that can potentially help in the prognostication of other diseases that are of global concern.

With factors such as increased acceptance in personalized medicine by the public and increasing efforts to reduce healthcare costs, IVD continues to be on-demand as it plays a vital role in supporting physicians to make necessary treatment decisions, the company added.

StratifiCare is the winner of the inaugural DBS Foundation Social Impact Prize in 2020.

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