From Exoskeletons to Foundational AI

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2019-2020: Founding of DFI

Dr Roeland P-J E Decorte founded Decorte Future Industries (DFI) in August 2019 as a solo founder, after spending two years independently developing exoskeleton systems capable of monitoring human health in his spare room. This early work attracted the attention of, and was ultimately endorsed by, the UK Ministry of Defence.

In 2020, Decorte made the strategic decision to move away from defence applications and focus on a version of the technology accessible to the general public, targeting large-scale health monitoring and screening, where unmet need is greatest.

2020-2021: First Investors

DFI was selected from thousands of applicants to join Techstars’ London accelerator in 2020, with Techstars waiving its usual policy against one-person companies, thus raising its first equity funding. Techstars later doubled down with a significant follow-on investment from its venture arm. The UK government also invested in DFI, through its innovation grants, funding two technical validation phases.

The company raised further capital from the co-founder and CTO of ARM, the CTO of IKEA, and other prominent US- and UK-based investors.

Following this financing, DFI began began assembling its early technical team, 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.

2021-2022: Hardware Prototypes and Proprietary Database Building

DFI built and tested multiple approaches to delivering sound-based AI to end users. This included an exoskeleton-derived smart-shirt prototype (Mark I, 2020-2021), followed by a compact button-style device (Mark II, 2022) focused mainly on end-to-end proprietary database building for AI training.

In 2022, Decorte expanded its pre-seed financing to a total of $1.6M, with participation from London and Silicon Valley-based venture funds.

2023-2025: Building SoNUS AI

By 2023, this body of work and data from real-world deployments enabled DFI to develop the world’s first sound-to-health foundation model: the Sound-based Natural Understanding System (SoNUS).

In 2024, recognising that long-term scalability lay in deployment via existing consumer hardware rather than custom devices, DFI shifted focus to running its models on standard smartphone microphones. In early 2025, the company overhauled its structure and strategy to accelerate the translation of its AI capabilities into real-world products, with the objective of making SoNUS commercially available.

2025-2026: First Revenue & Growth

The Sonus Health brand and app were created and launched roughly nine months later, with an initial focus on animal health and the veterinary sector. Sonus Health’s version of DFI’s SoNUS AI is now used in veterinary clinics across the world and has a waiting list of more than 160 clinics seeking access to the technology.

On the human health side, Decorte has delivered paid services under NDA with, among others, one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers.