Exoskeletons

Over the course of two years full-time work after his doctorate in ancient codebreaking, the company’s founder, Dr Roeland P-J E Decorte, invented, engineered, and brought to proof-of-concept the company’s initial technology - an exoskeleton that included AI controls and a novel biometric sensor architecture. The aim was to enable a new, efficient way to gather and upload human health data directly from human bodies into the cloud.

At the time just a one-man band, Decorte’s exoskeleton technology attracted the interest and ultimately endorsement of the UK Ministry of Defence and government in 2019-2020. Over the course of 2020, however, Decorte decided to move away from Defence and AI embedded in exoskeletons to focus on a version of the technology that was more accessible to the general public - where the greatest need for health monitoring and screening technology is.

Initial funding

In the summer of 2020, Decorte Future Industries was selected, uniquely for then still a one-person company, from thousands of startups worldwide to join Techstars’ London accelerator, thus successfully raising its first equity financing. Shortly after, the UK government decided to also invest in Decorte through its innovation grants arm, funding two successive testing phases of Decorte’s AI. During the Techstars programme, 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 capital raise, Roeland started building out a wider team. Reaching out to sensor groups at the University of Cambridge, where the company was based, Decorte started recruiting doctoral students such as the company’s first CTO (Sep 2020 - Feb 2025) Erika Bondareva, and Dr Kayla Butkow, who were both working on sound-based approaches. Together the team set out a plan to go all-in on sound as the most promising and cost-effective way to extract human health data, overcoming the limitations and cost of traditional technologies which led to the creation of the exoskeletons. Head of Software Jasbir Singh, at the time one of the foremost developers in London, joined at the same time to create the cloud infrastructure for the AI systems.

SoNUS

Over two years of R&D, the company deployed and examined the capabilities of sound-based AI integrated into an exoskeleton-derived smart shirt prototype (Mark I, 2020-2021) and then built a scaled-down sound-based button device focused mainly on data gathering for AI training (Mark II, 2022). At this point, in May 2022, Decorte expanded its pre-seed round to $1.6M in total funding, with participation of London and Silicon Valley-based venture funds, to support further development.

The company used the data gathered by the Mark II devices to train and create AI models that would ultimately, in turn, become the earliest versions of Decorte’s Sound-based Natural Understanding System (SoNUS, 2023/2024 onward). In late 2023 and 2024, Decorte pushed to shift from SoNUS running on custom hardware to focus on deploying the AI primarily on smartphones. Late 2024 and early 2025, Decorte decided to overhaul the company’s original research-focused structure to a product-focused approach, resolving to massively accelerate development and release the first app using SoNUS in Q2 2025.

At present, Decorte has ongoing paid pilots with, amongst others, one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers, and one of the world’s largest asset managers (with $5.8 trillion assets under management). Decorte has partnered with Apollo Hospitals, one of the largest healthcare providers in Asia, as well as with three US-based, and one EU-based, clinic, for data collection. Decorte is further working with insurers to bring its technology to the masses.