Read about the company in WIRED

Dr Roeland P-J E Decorte started DFI as a solo founder, having over the course of two years built exoskeletons monitoring human health in his spare room, attracting the interest and ultimately endorsement of the UK Ministry of Defence. In 2020, Decorte decided to move away from Defence to focus on a version of the tech accessible to the general public - where the greatest need for health monitoring and screening technology is.

DFI was selected from thousands to join Techstars’ London accelerator in 2020 (with Techstars’ waiving its normal policy discouraging one-person companies), followed by a significant investment from Techstars’ venture arm. The UK government also invested in DFI through its innovation grants arm, funding two successive testing phases. The company raised further capital from the co-founder and CTO of ARM, the CTO of IKEA, as well as other prominent US and UK-based investors.

Following this initial financing, DFI began hiring team members, initially reaching out to sensor groups at the University of Cambridge, where the company was based. Decorte cold contacted and recruited doctoral students working specifically on Machine Learning to extract health data from sound, as well as software and ML engineers from around the world.

The company built and tested in-market various ways of bringing sound-based AI to the general public, including integrated into an exoskeleton-derived smart shirt prototype (Mark I, 2020-2021) and then built a scaled-down button device focused mainly on data gathering for AI training (Mark II, 2022). In 2022, Decorte expanded its pre-seed round to $1.6M in total funding, with participation from London and Silicon Valley-based venture funds.

In 2023, this work and data from real-world deployments ultimately led to building the world’s first sound-to-health foundation model, DFI’s Sound-based Natural Understanding System (SoNUS). In 2024, believing the future of the tech to be in deploying via existing consumer devices rather than custom hardware, focus shifted to getting DFI’s models to work using standard smartphone microphones, while in early 2025 the founder overhauled the company’s original research-focused structure, parting ways with the doctoral researchers at the company, to pivot to a decidedly product-focused approach. The Sonus Health brand was created and launched just six months later, with initial deployment in the veterinary sector.

The Sonus Health app is currently used in veterinary clinics across the world, as well as by dog owners everywhere. On the human side, Decorte has paid pilots under NDA with, amongst others, one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers and one of the world’s largest asset managers.