Spike raises $3.5M to supercharge Health Enterprises with GenAI technology

2024-06-04

Silicon Valley-headquartered Spike closes an oversubscribed $3.5 million seed round to accelerate GenAI technology adoption and health data integration for healthcare enterprises.
Spike's B2B solution enables developers to incorporate AI functionalities into their applications at a fraction of traditional build. This comes on top of high-quality data accessed via Spike API that aggregates patients' health information from 300 medical, wearable, and IoT sources.
The seed investment will fund Spike’s ambition to provide “Trustworthy Health AI” tools for health tech businesses with LLM hallucination control and regulatory-compliant data infrastructure products.

Spike, a B2B data technology and AI startup has announced the successful close of an oversubscribed seed round that will be used to fuel continued growth and product expansion. Addressing an increasing demand from end customers, Spike offers healthcare and digital health businesses a solution to incorporate AI into their applications in a safe, efficient, and compliant way.

The $3.5 million round was co-led by Practica Capital and TheVentureCity with participation from Silicon Valley, New York, and Berlin-based investors, including CEAS Investments, Plug & Play Ventures, Geek Ventures, and Axel Springer Porsche (APX).

The healthcare industry generates approximately 30 percent of the world's data volume according to LEK¹. This figure is partially attributed to the adoption of medical and commercial IoT/wearable devices by over a billion users², and is expected to only increase thanks to rapid advancements in sensor hardware technologies³.

Healthcare and health tech businesses, ranging from science-backed fitness studios, and digital health apps to nutrition clinics and hospitals, are now looking to incorporate AI into their operations. By leveraging the power of new health data, LLMs, computer vision, and other Machine Learning (ML) techniques, these organizations can offer their end-users hyper-personalized and preventative health products.

However, integrating these technologies often encounters significant challenges, including strict regulatory compliance on sensitive health data, LLM hallucinations, intense competition for AI engineering talent, lengthy development timelines, and high costs.

Through its white-labeled SDKs, Spike provides non-diagnostic and easy-to-implement RAG AI (Retrieval Augmented Generation) products for health professionals and end users. Examples include personal trainer co-pilots for fitness progress summaries on wearable data, dietitian co-pilots with nutrient value assessment from meal photos, nurse co-pilots to manage post-treatment patient follow-up, and physician co-pilots to detect early anomalies from EHR and lab test data.

Spike’s competitive moat is its health data API aggregator platform, feeding high-quality biomarkers from 300 sources which helped secure Spike’s place at NVIDIA’s Inception Program designed for GenAI startups in Silicon Valley. Spike’s customer base includes global insurance leader Seguros SURA, fitness apps Longevo and FITTR, sleep innovation company EMMA, women's wellness app Moody Month, and vagus nerve stimulator Pulsetto.

Povilas Gudzius, Spike CEO and Co-founder, commented, “Advancements in retrieval-augmented generation AI mean that LLMs are no longer taking a ‘best guess,’ but are now able to seek out specialized context producing outputs that are much more accurate and considerably less prone to hallucinations. By incorporating this technology on top of Spike’s high-quality health data API, we’re enabling our clients to easily leverage these tools and improve the health of millions of end users.”

Donatas Keras, Partner at Practica Capital, commented, “We were impressed by the Spike team’s technical expertise and go-to-market skills. Given their rapid traction and widespread adoption of AI products with formidable competitive moats, leading this round was a natural fit for us. As the influx of sensor data changes some parts of the health industry, Spike is well-positioned for significant growth, and we are excited to partner with such a forward-thinking team.”

Álvaro Sanz, Partner at TheVentureCity, commented, "The fact that Spike was able to close an oversubscribed round and accumulate significant investor interest, particularly in this down market, is a validation of Spike's potential."

Spike was founded 18 months ago by Povilas Gudzius, who previously worked on the Quant data and AI team at Bloomberg in NYC, and Cambridge-educated Chief Data Officer Nikita Pajanok. The team is supported by Auguste Kakneviciute, former Lead of IoT Sales at Ubuntu; Monika Da Silva Xavier, ex-Google; Anton Autushka, ex-Head of Engineering at Wannaby (sold to Farfetch) and 18 other talented tech specialists.

The seed investment will fuel Spike’s development of regulatory-compliant and safe Generative AI products and expansion to support a broader range of medical, wearables, and IoT sensor data aggregation from over 600 devices. Those will expand to Electronic Health Records (EHR) data, blood testing, lab testing, genomics data, and FDA-approved devices and datasets.

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