EIT Health-supported PIPRA concludes €2.1M seed round

PIPRA has recently closed a successful seed round of international investment, led by the Start Angels Network, and raised €2.1 million. Founded in 2019 and based in Zurich, Switzerland, PIPRA AG (Pre-Interventional Preventive Risk Assessment) recognised that a reliable pre-surgical risk assessment tool was urgently needed to enable the clinical implementation of post-operative delirium (POD) prevention guidelines. Such a tool would facilitate a dramatic reduction in hospital costs and improve surgical outcomes and patients’ quality of life.

In September 2021, PIPRA launched a CE-certified artificial intelligence (AI)-based pre-operative test to assess a patient’s risk of suffering from post-operative delirium after surgery. Prior to an operation, a doctor can enter routinely collected patient history data into the browser-based, platform-independent software and, in less than a minute, have a POD risk score for their patient. The technology leverages the biotechnology start-up’s carefully curated and harmonised patient database to calculate an individual and reliable risk score of presenting POD. Subsequently, it delivers real-time results. Among the first paying clients are European institutions such as the Hirslanden Hospital, Cantonal Hospital Baden and University Hospital Basel.

Besides the financing round, the start-up has attracted funding from Dutch-based forward VC, Zurich Kantonalbank, and Plug and Play, and obtained non-equity-based grants totalling over €750,000 from Innosuisse. The grant funding has been used to launch a multi-centre project with University Hospital Geneva, University Hospital Basel and Le Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV). PIPRA also previously received grant-for-option investment from the EIT Health Wildcard to the value of €1.3 million.

“PIPRA proposes a new tool that allows rapid determination of an individual patient’s risk to develop postoperative delirium after an operation. This is a very exciting and important development which can improve current clinical practice. We will finally be able to not only target resource-intensive non-pharmacological preventive interventions to those patients who benefit the most, but we will also be able to design clinical trials regarding delirium based on risk groups,” says Prof. Dr. med. Luzius Steiner, Head of Anesthesiology at Basel University Hospital.

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