German digital medtech startup hema.to receives €3.6 million investment from LUMO Labs and Bayern Kapital for AI-based blood data analysis.

Munich-based digital medtech company hema.to today announced the successful closing of a new €3.6 million funding round led by LUMO Labs and followed by Bayern Kapital, several US angel investors, and investors from their previous round. Hema.to automates complex blood data analysis through AI-powered cytometry, reducing lab analysis time from ~20 minutes to 1 minute, eliminating human subjectivity in detecting leukaemia and lymphoma, and eradicating 90% of false negatives for secondary pathologies.

Hema.to’s AI pulls data from a massive database of over 600,000 files from over 20 leading centers. With their CE-marked AI models for clinical-grade performance and their new end-to-end solution in the process of a new certification, Hema.to is already helping labs and hospitals across Europe diagnose blood cancers.

The newly raised funds will be used to refine product-market-fit in their first segment of blood cancer diagnostics, including additional European certification, and for clinical studies, expansion into diagnosis of broader immune disorders, and scaling commercial deployment.

“At hema.to we like to say that we want to ‘make your blood speak,” says Karsten Miermans, hema.to’s CEO and co-founder. “Every 3rd person suffers from a life-altering immune disease at some point in their life. Blood data holds the key to the immune system, but at present life-threatening illnesses like leukaemia or lymphoma, can be overlooked in blood analysis—even when the data that indicates otherwise is right there. Through the AI models on our platform, we pull this data to the surface to get every patient an accurate diagnosis and treatment as early as possible. This is how we save lives.”

Amidst rising sample volumes and workforce shortages in Europe’s busiest clinical labs, cytometry teams typically need 20 minutes per patient sample, concentrating on complex, high-dimensional blood data. Fatigue, rising workloads, and limited staffing add to the risk of missed or delayed diagnosis.

“Through our investments in emerging technologies in Digital Health and Medtech, we want to improve the quality of life of patients and professionals and relieve the ever-increasing strain on public healthcare,” says Sven Bakkes, Founding Partner of LUMO Labs. “We are very happy to welcome hema.to into our portfolio. Their AI-powered platform scans raw cytometry files in seconds, detecting more diseases than human analysts can and soon also at earlier stages. For busy clinicians, that means a fraction of the manual analysis time. For patients, it can be the difference between a missed pathology and a life-saving early intervention.”

Hema.to is headquartered in Munich and has 22 full-time employees across Germany, Portugal, Spain, Poland and Belgium.

In addition to the commercial deployment of their CE-marked AI engine in Europe, hema.to has academic collaborations in the US top-ranking institutes such as U Penn, and a distribution partnership in Israel.

“The workload and pressure in clinical laboratories is high and for life-threatening diseases such as leukemia or lymphoma, early and accurate diagnosis can make the difference between negative disease progression and life-saving, early intervention. With hema.to’s AI-supported analysis platform, the time taken to analyze blood data can be reduced to a fraction of the usual manual time. In this way, the company not only relieves the burden on clinical laboratories and promotes patient well-being, but also addresses a global market with a volume of several billion dollars. We therefore see great potential in hema.to’s solution – both in Europe, where it is already being used in various laboratories and internationally,” says Monika Steger, Managing Director of Bayern Kapital.

About hema.to

hema.to is a deeptech AI company transforming cytometry and immune medicine through end-to-end cloud-based software. Its clinical-grade AI software enables early and accurate diagnosis of blood cancers and immune diseases, paving the way for personalized treatments based on each patient’s unique immune system.

Founded in Munich in 2021 by Dr. Karsten Miermans (CEO), Felix Kunzweiler (CTO), Dr. Franz Elsner, and later joined by Dr. Aleksandra Mezydlo, hema.to has grown into a team of 22 experts spanning regulatory, medical, AI, engineering, and commercial fields.

hema.to media contact
Karsten Miermans, CEO, karsten@hema.to
www.hema.to

About LUMO Labs

LUMO Rise Fund is a MEUR 100 multi-stage (Pre-Seed to Series A) impact-driven venture capital fund, with a proprietary startup coaching program for purpose-driven founders, who seek to bring technological innovations to the market to help solve social and environmental challenges.

LUMO Rise Fund invests in scalable and financially sustainable operating systems, infrastructures, and platforms based on and/or related to emerging and potentially disruptive technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence & Data, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Digital Security, and Extended Realities (AR/VR). The fund’s impact focus is best identified as the bottom-up cross-roads between the following UN SDGs: Health & Wellbeing, Quality Education, Sustainable Cities & Communities, and Climate Action.

The primary investment region is Benelux and Germany, and secondary Nordics, Baltics and the Iberian Peninsula. LUMO Rise Fund is the successor fund of LUMO Fund II managed by LUMO Labs, founded in 2016 by former tech entrepreneurs Andy Lürling and Sven Bakkes.

About Bayern Kapital

Bayern Kapital is the venture capital company of the Free State of Bavaria and, with 700 million euros under management, investments of up to 25 million euros per company, over 110 active portfolio companies and 30 years of experience in the VC business, is one of the most active, financially strongest and most experienced investors in the DACH region. Bayern Kapital invests in a consortium with private investors in Bavarian high-tech and deep-tech start-ups and scale-ups with innovative business models from all sectors, from the seed and scale-up phase through to exit.

Since its foundation in 1995, Bayern Kapital has invested over 500 million euros of its own equity capital in more than 320 start-ups and scale-ups from sectors such as life sciences, software & IT, materials & new materials, nanotechnology and environmental technology. This has created over 10,000 permanent jobs in sustainable companies in Bavaria.

Examples of numerous pioneering success stories that Bayern Kapital has supported from an early stage include Casavi, Catalym, commercetools, egym, EOS, Fazua, Immunic, Isar Aerospace, IQM, Parcellab, Proglove, Qbilon, Riskmethods, SimScale, Sirion, tado, Tubulis and many more.
https://bayernkapital.de/en

About Heal

Heal Capital is a leading European venture capital firm investing in early-stage and technology-driven healthcare startups. Their first €100M fund was initiated and financed by Germany’s private health insurers in 2020. Recently, Heal Capital launched its second fund of over €100M, expanding their LP base to the broader healthcare industry.
https://www.healcapital.com

About Elaia

Elaia Partners is a European top-tier Venture Capital firm with a strong technology DNA, investing in technology disruptors with global ambition from early stage to growth development. For the past 20 years, our commitment has been to deliver high performance with values.
We are proud to have been an active partner in over 100 startups including success stories such as Criteo (Nasdaq), Orchestra Networks (acquired by Tibco), Volterra (acquired by F5), Mirakl (valued $3.5B in Series E), Shift Technology (valued $1B+ in Series D), Mablink Bioscience (acquired by Eli Lilly), Aqemia and Alice&Bob.
Learn more www.elaia.com • @Elaia_Partners

About HTGF – High-Tech Gründerfonds

HTGF is one of the leading and most active early-stage investors in Germany and Europe, financing start-ups in the fields of Deep Tech, Industrial Tech, Climate Tech, Digital Tech, Life Sciences and Chemistry. With its experienced investment team, HTGF supports start-ups in all phases of their development into international market leaders. HTGF invests in pre-seed and seed phases and can participate significantly in later-stage financing rounds. Across its funds, HTGF has over 2 billion euros under management. Since its inception in 2005, HTGF has financed more than 770 start-ups and achieved over 190 successful exits. 
Fund investors in the public-private partnership include the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, KfW Capital as well as 45 companies and family offices. 
For more information, please visit HTGF.de or follow us on LinkedIn.  

Media contact
High-Tech Gründerfonds Management GmbH
Tobias Jacob, Senior Marketing & Communications Manager
T.: +49 228 – 82300 – 121
t.jacob@htgf.de