Lithuanian-founded Spike secures €3.2M to help health enterprises with GenAI technology

Silicon Valley-headquartered and Lithuanian-founded Spike, a B2B data technology and AI startup, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $3.5M (approximately €3.2M) in an oversubscribed seed round.

The funding rounding 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 company will use the funds to speed up the development of regulatory-compliant and safe Generative AI products.

This includes expanding support to encompass a wider range of medical, wearables, and IoT sensor data aggregation from over 600 devices.

These expansions will incorporate Electronic Health Records (EHR) data, blood testing, lab testing, genomics data, and FDA-approved devices and datasets.

What does Spike solve?

According to LEK, the healthcare industry generates around 30 per cent of the world’s data volume. This is partially due to the widespread use of medical and commercial IoT/wearable devices by over a billion users.

The adoption of these devices is expected to increase even further due to rapid advancements in sensor hardware technologies

Healthcare and health tech businesses, including science-backed fitness studios, digital health apps, nutrition clinics, and hospitals, are now seeking to integrate AI into their operations.

By leveraging new health data, LLMs, computer vision, and other Machine Learning (ML) techniques, these organisations aim to offer highly personalised and preventive health products to their end-users.

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

Spike: Supercharging health enterprises with GenAI

Founded in 2022 by Povilas Gudzius and Nikita Pajanok, Spike is a B2B data technology and artificial intelligence (AI) startup.

Spike provides non-diagnostic and easy-to-implement RAG AI (Retrieval Augmented Generation) products for health professionals and end users through its white-labeled SDKs.

Examples of these products include personal trainer co-pilots for fitness progress summaries based on wearable data, dietitian co-pilots that assess nutrient values from meal photos, nurse co-pilots for post-treatment patient follow-up, and physician co-pilots for early anomaly detection from EHR and lab test data.

Spike services clients in the digital health, professional fitness, nutrition, healthcare, and insurance sectors.

Spike’s key advantage is its health data API aggregator platform, which collects top-quality biomarkers from 300 sources.

This led to Spike being selected for NVIDIA’s Inception Program, aimed at GenAI startups in Silicon Valley.

Spike works with a diverse customer base, including 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, comments, “Advancements in retrieval-augmented generation AI mean that LLMs are no longer taking a ‘best guess,’ but are now able to seek out specialised 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.”

The investors

Practica Capital is a dedicated early-stage Baltic VC focusing on investments in the Baltic and Baltic-origin ventures in Europe.

Donatas Keras, Partner at Practica Capital, comments, “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.

TheVentureCity is a global early-stage venture fund focused on product-centric startups across the US, Europe, and Latam. Álvaro Sanz, Partner at TheVentureCity, comments, “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.”