Zeit Medical, which makes an early warning system for strokes during sleep, has raised $2M in a seed round just after leaving Y Combinator's Summer 2021 cohort. The company's work suggests the brain-monitoring headband could save lives by alerting people to possible strokes hours before they might otherwise be noticed, and the new funding will help propel them towards commercial availability. The company's device is a soft headband with a lightweight electroencephalogram (EEG) in it. It works with a smartphone app to analyze brain activity and, using a machine learning model trained by human experts, watch for signs of an impending stroke. I wrote up Zeit's system in detail in August, and little has changed since then, though co-founder and CEO (and now Ferolyn fellow) Orestis Vardoulis noted that a usage study found that people wore the headband on 90 percent of nights, including people using CPAP machines, and there were few complaints about fit or comfort.

Those at risk are always vigilant for the signs of a stroke in progress, but no one can be vigilant when they're sleeping, meaning thousands of people suffer "wake-up strokes" that are only identified hours after the fact. Zeit Medical's brain-monitoring wearable could help raise the alarm and get people to the hospital fast enough to mitigate the stroke's damage and potentially save lives. A few decades ago, there wasn't much anyone could do to help a stroke victim. But an effective medication entered use in the '90s, and a little later a surgical procedure was also pioneered -- but both need to be administered within a few hours of the stroke's onset. Orestis Vardoulis and Urs Naber started Zeit ("time") after seeing the resources being put towards reducing the delay between a 911 call regarding a stroke and the victim getting the therapy needed.