Seerlinq is a Slovak MedTech company developing non-invasive hemodynamic monitoring that predicts worsening heart failure before patients decompensate. Its solution is already reimbursed by public health insurance in both Slovakia and Germany.
NXTin.Health spoke to Seerlinq founder and CEO Allan Böhm, who is a practising cardiologist as well as an entrepreneur. This summer, he visited Brussels, where he addressed an EPP-organised summit on European startups and scale-ups.
We explore how Seerlinq’s monitoring model works day to day, its expansion beyond Slovakia, and why, like so many European MedTech founders before him, Böhm warns that fragmentation keeps pushing companies like his towards the US.
We noticed you were recently in Brussels for an EPP-organised summit on startups and scale-ups, and you made a point that echoes something we keep hearing ourselves: that it is genuinely difficult for European companies to bring their innovation to patients, commercialise it, and scale. What, practically, needs to happen for that to change?
There are many aspects to this, but fragmentation of the healthcare system is the most challenging one. Everything starts with investment, and that’s already one of the first differences between the EU and the US.
American investors are simply more used to taking risk. In Europe, an investment means a lot of bureaucracy, while in the US, you have SAFEs, you sign a two-page document and that’s it. Moreover, every EU country has a slightly different legal framework for accepting investment, which complicates things considerably.
On the other hand, it’s genuinely helpful that the EU supports so many VC funds. That was our case too, with our first investors having received some parts of their finances from the EU. This was key to how we secured our early funding. The US pours more money into venture capital overall, but the gap with Europe isn’t as large as people assume.
Once you have investment, you start developing, and here the EU actually works well: one medical certification, the CE marking under the MDR, covers the whole bloc. This is similar to how FDA approval works for the whole of the US.
The real bottleneck comes when you want to go to market, especially in MedTech, because every country has a different health system, different insurance structure, and different reimbursement rules. That’s actually what I proposed in the European Parliament, and the MEPs responded well to it: a central EU institute that evaluates new solutions, and, if there’s enough clinical evidence to show benefit, grants clearance that effectively says “this is an innovation the EU wants”. That would make it more or less mandatory for national health systems, whether statutory insurers or a state system like the NHS, to consider reimbursing it. The reimbursement terms themselves would still be negotiated locally, but right now, before you even reach that stage, you need to generate clinical evidence to a different standard in every single country. If that first step were centralised, everything downstream would be far simpler. Only the actual insurer contracts would still need separate negotiation.
That is a complaint we hear constantly from founders in different countries. Tell me about what you have built – is Seerlinq a B2B model, or is this something a patient could buy directly?
It’s built for healthcare providers, so they can monitor patients already diagnosed with heart failure non-invasively and remotely, while the patient stays at home. These patients live at high risk of acute decompensation, with repeated emergency admissions, a lot of anxiety and poor quality of life. Much of that is preventable if you catch the deterioration early enough, and that is what our monitoring is for. Every two days the patient takes a measurement with our Seerlinq pulse oximeter: two minutes standing, two minutes lying down. The change in posture provokes a hemodynamic response, and the sensor captures a high-quality PPG signal. Our HeartCore algorithm analyses that response and estimates left ventricular filling pressure, a parameter that starts rising long before the patient notices anything.
Day-to-day monitoring is run by nurses, and the physician only steps in when something changes. Filling pressure can start rising up to four weeks before acute decompensation. That gives the nurse enough time to alert the physician, who can then adjust treatment. That lead time is the whole point: the cardiologist can act calmly rather than react to an emergency.
Usually, the adjustment happens over the phone: the physician increases the diuretic or optimises therapy, the patient keeps measuring at home, and the deterioration never becomes an event. No ambulance, no admission, and often the patient never even notices that something was heading in the wrong direction.
That is why we target cardiologists rather than patients directly. The patient generates the signal, but the physician is the one who acts on it. This is the piece that makes the whole thing work.
We are also putting a new algorithm for atrial fibrillation through certification, running on the same signal. AFib is very common, and detecting it matters because it is what triggers anticoagulation and stroke prevention. For us it is a natural extension of our remote monitoring suite: AFib is present in a large share of heart failure patients, up to half in advanced disease, and a sudden deterioration in rhythm can put a patient in hospital within days. Catching both filling pressure and rhythm from one measurement the patient is already taking makes the monitoring considerably more complete.
Beyond the heart failure platform and service, we are working with consumer wearable manufacturers of smartwatches and smart rings. The same algorithm runs on the PPG signal those devices already collect, which enables two things: screening people at risk of heart failure who have never been diagnosed, and remote monitoring for those who have.
And geographically — are you still concentrated in Slovakia, or already expanding?
We’re expanding. Slovakia was the first country where we obtained reimbursement from health insurers, and by now we’ve enrolled more than a thousand Slovak patients in our system. Reimbursement in Germany followed this year, and we’re launching that market now, alongside the countries where patients pay out of pocket through our distributors. Our current distributors operate in Scandinavia, Poland, Italy and Israel. Furthermore, at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich at the end of August, we secured several new partnerships with doctors, clinics and distributors from across the world, including from the UK, France, Czechia, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Argentina and India. This was a record achievement in terms of our conference reach, and we’re very eager to see our international footprint grow.
Can you tell me a bit about yourself — how does a cardiologist end up building a MedTech company?
I’m a physician, a cardiologist by training, and I run my own private clinic in Bratislava where I see patients two days a week. Continuing my clinical practice is really important to me, as I can observe, in real time, where any gaps appear, what could be improved, and how patients actually respond to the technology. Daily, I tread between the fields of medicine, research and entrepreneurship, which, given my purely academic and clinical background, initially felt incredibly alien.
Very early on I realised that if I actually wanted to help people at scale and do something meaningful for healthcare rather than just through my own clinical practice, it was never going to happen through standard medical work alone. All along, the real motivation was coming up with a scalable invention and then translating it into clinical practice, which inevitably means entering the world of entrepreneurship. Physicians aren’t used to thinking about money in the medical system; we simply want to treat patients without worrying about the commercial side, and, to be completely honest, understanding the importance of the commercial side took some adjustment.
At this point, however, I genuinely enjoy combining the three fields. As a physician, I see the clinical gaps and what patients actually need. A lot of startups are founded by technical people who build something impressive that turns out to be clinically less useful than expected. I see the demand directly in my own practice, which lets me think about problems as a physician rather than purely as a researcher, and then test solutions properly. I studied clinical trials at Oxford, which helps enormously: it taught me how to design a study correctly and leverage its evidence to get an innovation into clinical practice.
What about funding — are you actively raising, and are you looking beyond Europe?
A year ago, we started trying to raise five million from investors in our first big funding round. We ended up with five and a half million, consisting of a four million non-dilutive grant plus one and a half million in equity, which we closed in September, meaning we exceeded the target with far less dilution. We’re in a healthy position on funding. Our end goal is the US market. We’re currently going through FDA clearance, and we’ll open a US round ahead of clearance to fund our go-to-market there. At this point, we’re already speaking with investors. We’re not in urgent need of capital, but we’re building steadily towards the US.
Do you plan to stay headquartered in Europe, or eventually move operations to the US entirely?
We are happy with our European headquarters; the quality of people here is excellent and, frankly, we like it here. Slovakia and Germany are our home markets and we are expanding across Europe now, so the US comes on top of that rather than in place of it.
Ahead of the next funding round, we plan to establish a US entity, which will also provide the appropriate structure for US investors. Following FDA clearance, we expect to build a commercial and operational presence in the US while continuing to grow our European business.
That is what we keep hearing. Around ninety per cent of the European founders we’ve spoken to say something similar. Does that mean Europe only ever produces the companies that start here, then flip to the US and effectively sell back into Europe from there?
It comes back to what we discussed earlier: the power of one unified US market, where you get FDA approval, negotiate a single reimbursement code, and a market of over three hundred million people opens up. Compare that to Europe, where you’re negotiating country by country.
So, until Europe unifies that fragmented system, the US will always be the more attractive place to build?
For now, that is unfortunately the case. And it’s a huge shame, because everything is roughly four times cheaper to build in Europe. As mentioned, inventing and developing here is genuinely difficult when it comes to raising investment, but once something is built, it’s built far more cheaply and oftentimes just as effectively. Too often, just as a product is ready, the company moves to the US, which is where the financial value ends up being created. Essentially, Europe acts as the incubator while the US captures the actual value. That is exactly what my proposal in Parliament is meant to change. Slovakia and Germany prove the model can work in Europe; it just shouldn’t take a separate fight in every country.
