Decorte Future Industries is a Cambridge, UK-based deep tech company that extracts health data from sound.
Company history
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 UK 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, and largest market, is.
Initial funding
In the summer of 2020, Decorte was selected, uniquely for a one-person company, from tens of thousands of companies worldwide to join Techstars’ London accelerator, thus successfully raising its first $120K equity financing. At the same time, the UK government decided to invest $280K 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, Decorte started building out a world-class team. The company’s CTO, Erika Bondareva, at the time undertaking her PhD in sound-based AI at the University of Cambridge, joined in the fall of 2020 and, with Decorte, they together set out a plan to go all-in on sound as the most promising and cost-effective way to easily extract human health data from the body. Head of Software Jasbir Singh, at the time one of the foremost developers in London, joined to create the cloud infrastructure for the planned AI systems.
Audio-based smart clothing to SoNUS
Over two years of R&D, the company deployed and examined the effects of sound-based AI integrated into an exoskeleton-derived smart shirt prototype (Mark I, 2020-2021), and 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). Over the course of 2022 and 2023, Decorte partnered with Apollo Hospitals, one of the largest healthcare providers in the world, variously the largest in Asia, as well as with three US-based, and one EU-based, clinic, for an expansive programme of human data collection and clinical studies. These studies enable Decorte to gather the largest audio-to-health dataset in the world, supporting the SoNUS models.
Decorte has begun deploying SoNUS in the insurance space, where its health screening capabilities save insurers and their clients tens of thousands in costs by enabling early detection and preventing hospitalisation. Decorte aims to see its technology on 3 billion smartphones by 2027.
Team
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Roeland Decorte
CEO
BA/MA, MPhil, PhD from the University of Cambridge; doctoral work on code-breaking cited by world experts. Started Decorte as a solo founder, engineered initial exoskeleton tech, sensors and AI-controls over two years full-time before incorporating the company and gathering the team, ultimately leading the charge towards building audio-based SoNUS models. Originally joined Cambridge as youngest of his nation in its 800-year history.
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Erika Bondareva
CTO
PhD in Machine Learning/AI from the Systems Research Group at the University of Cambridge. First employee at Decorte. MRes in Sensor Technologies and Applications from Cambridge, MEng in Biomedical Engineering from Glasgow. Her doctoral work on “Machine Learning for efficient cardiovascular health diagnostic and progression through audio signals” helped inspire the direction of the company in moving from exoskeleton- to sound-based AI.
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Jasbir Singh
Head of Software
BA/MA Mathematics from University of ambridge. Senior full-stack software developer with 9 years full-stack experience, having worked for high-profile startups and corporates (Builder.ai, Qonto), as well as having run his own software consultancy firm. Selected by Techstars London 2020 as London’s top dev to mentor the year’s cohort, after which he joined Decorte. Has led software and infrastructure development for SoNUS.
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Vijay Venkataramani
Machine Learning Engineer
Research MS in Computational Natural Sciences, Machine Learning/AI, at the Centre for Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics at IIIT Hyderabad. Harvard Business School 2+2 deferred entry. Previously worked on Google's AI for Social Good Initiative, building an AI Enabled Home Care System as an ML developer, and as a software developer for an early-stage startup. Instrumental in coding SoNUS, as well as setting out its concept, structure and implementation.
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Kayla Butkow
Machine Learning Advisor
PhD in Machine Learning/AI from the Systems Research Group at the University of Cambridge. MRes in Sensor Technologies and Applications from Cambridge and degrees in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand. Doctoral work on “Earables for audio-based physiological sensing”. Has worked on the downstream algorithms of, and helped set out the structure of SoNUS.
Board & Investor Board
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Susan Standiford
CTO IKEA, CTO Disney Online, Director of Engineering at Oracle, VP of Technology at Travelocity, CPTO Stepstone
Board Member“Roeland and the DFI team are doing extremely interesting things for convergence science - they’re inventing and creating capabilities that will have broad effects on health monitoring across markets.
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Trupen Modi
Sr Director of Digital Healthcare Microsoft
Board Observer“The Decorte team have built a market differentiator product that will transform the healthtech landscape. Integrating with existing infrastructure, their unique AI can identify and monitor alignments, resulting in efficient data collection as well as early detection and intervention. I personally believe this team is extremely talented and will generate substantial revenue.”
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Mike Muller
Co-Founder & CTO ARM
Investor“I’m excited to see products and services that can help address the pressing problems of cost and quality in care. These issues will only increase in the coming years with our changing demographics and pressure on health care budgets. Intelligent technology underpinned by Machine Learning such as Decorte’s is the only way to address these challenges at scale.“
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Gordon Hollingworth
CPO & co-CTO Raspberry Pi
Board Member“The Decorte team have built an unrivalled technology suite in their mission to democratise access to complex health data. Having been part of their journey from the very beginning I have no doubt they are headed for tremendous success.”
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Eamonn Carey
MD Techstars London, GP Tera Ventures, GP The Fund
Board Member“I saw Roeland for the first time on the BBC and was immediately struck by their personality and character and passion for what they were building. As we were getting feedback from external assessors and people who were looking at the pitches, I got a number of messages saying we would be insane not to invest in this company. And I agreed - I have been writing and tweeting and talking about the need for this kind of tech for ages.”
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Hugo Chardon
Co-founder AMROCK Ventures
Board Observer
“Decorte is revolutionizing the way to listen to the human body. Their foundational AI which uses Machine Learning algorithms to extract human biometric data directly from audio is ground-breaking and opens up various commercial avenues.”
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William Casey King
Sr Director of AI Strategy Microsoft, Director Capstone Program Yale University,AI Next Campaign DARPA,“Big Data” initiative Obama Administration
Advisor
”I am truly excited by the nature of the technology the Decorte team is building, which I believe is unique in its field in terms of depth and execution.” -
Ashish Parikh
Founder Heart and Vascular Clinics Newark, Middletown and Wilmington, American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, American College of Physicians
Clinical Advisory Board
“I’ve calculated that Decorte’s technology would save the average patient of my clinics roughly $20K in clinical and hospitalisation costs, per patient, and optimise clinic workflows about 15-30%, all without mentioning the vastly better outcomes for patients. I am excited to host and help run Decorte’s US-based clinical studies so that their technology can become available to the tens of thousands of patients my clinics serve.
