Sonde Health raises $19.25M to monitor patients through their voice

The company can detect respiratory and mental health conditions with less than a minute of sound

The engagement problem in health is a roadblock for preventive care: most health monitoring is difficult to use and usually is prescribed once the patient has been diagnosed. People don’t act early enough on their health and wellness unless they have convincing, objective context and data.

Sonde Health is a health technology company committed to bringing accessible health monitoring to everyone, and it does so in a unique way: the company's vocal biomarker technology can provide insight and tell if you are at risk for conditions of mental health and respiratory health simply by using a short voice sample.

"Voice is perfect because it is being used all the time, is non-invasive, and easy to capture. Once people have insight into their health, over time they will act upon it. Early detection and interventions improve health outcomes," David Liu, CEO of Sonde Health, told VatorNews.

"We are providing AI-powered voice analysis of six to 30 seconds of voice captured on devices like smartphones. Our API will work with any 3rdparty app or device chipset to provide longitudinal voice analysis and health condition insight."

On Thursday, the company announced a $19.25 million Series B investment round led by Partners Investment, with participation from NEOM Company, KT Corporation, and existing investors, including co-founder PureTech Health and M Ventures. This brings it total funding to $35.25 million.

Founded in 2015, the Boston-based Sonde has a health-labeled voice dataset with over 1.2 million voice samples from over 85,000 subjects on four continents.

The company uses that data to provide its customers, which include health payors, remote patient monitoring companies, companies with telemedicine apps, providers, pharma and device OEMs, with data and insights so they can improve remote patient/user monitoring services and workflows, patient stratification to help find the right patient at the right time, and existing voice data analysis to provide data and insight from call center audio.

The company currently licenses its platform to customers globally in two ways, the first being  health checks for respiratory and mental fitness. Sonde’s platform can detect and monitor respiratory health conditions, like asthma, from six seconds of voice, while it can detect and monitor evidence of depression and anxiety from 30 seconds of voice. For respiratory fitness, patients are engaging with Sonde at least two times a week, while that number is at least three times a week for mental fitness health checks.

The company also lincences its platform for Vocal Biomarker Development, developing novel vocal biomarkers using its proprietary “research-build-validation” methodology with clinical partners.

Sonde says it will will use the funding to drive its global commercial growth, deepen its respiratory and mental health monitoring technologies, and build capabilities for additional health conditions, though Liu wasn't able to say which ones those would be at the moment.

"International interest in what Sonde does is high, as is their appetite to use our technology and solutions in the near term," he said. "Our respiratory and mental fitness will work for different use cases across healthcare and beyond in more countries around the world."

The ultimate goal with Sonde, Liu explained, is "to enable everyone in the world to have access to preventive care through voice."

"Everyone should be able to have a health check in their pocket so they can pay attention to early signals coming from their body."