Vilnius-based Spike, a B2B data technology and AI startup, has announced the successful close of an €3.2 million oversubscribed seed round that will be used to fuel continued growth and product expansion.
The 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).
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.
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. These organizations can offer their end-users hyper-personalized and preventative health products by leveraging the power of new health data, LLMs, computer vision, and other Machine Learning (ML) techniques.
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, said: “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, added: “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 17 other talented tech specialists.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/06/lithuanian-startup-spike-raises-e3-2-million-to-supercharge-health-enterprises-with-genai/
