French medical device company RDS has raised €14m ($16.4m) to accelerate the European market roll-out of MultiSense, a remote patient monitoring (RPM) wearable.
The company’s Series A funding round was led by Sociétés de Projets Industriels (SPI), an investment fund managed on behalf of the French state by Bpifrance. New investor Critical Path Ventures and existing investors, including MACSF and Capital Grand Est, also participated.
RDS’s MultiSense system comprises a wearable patch and cloud platform for monitoring patient vitals, including heart and respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, and skin temperature.
Suitable for in-hospital or at-home use, MultiSense received a European CE mark in March 2024 and has since been rolled out in 15 hospitals across France, Belgium, and Germany.
To accelerate the system’s ongoing commercialisation across Europe, RDS plans to use the fresh funding towards scaling up its production and refurbishing capacities, with plans to create "several hundred" new jobs by 2035 to support these and related commercial activities on the continent.
Bringing its total funds to date to around €28m, RDS also plans to use the latest funding to initiate clinical trials to support MultiSense in securing reimbursement in France and across Europe and to initiate the system’s registration process with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), with a US market launch anticipated by 2028.
RDS’s CEO Elie Lobel commented: “These funds mean we can roll out our solution more widely to hospitals, expand its positive impact for patients and care teams, and provide reliable, continuous, clinically validated remote monitoring to as many facilities as possible.”
The remote patient monitoring market
Catalysed by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, a GlobalData report from 2023 forecasts that the RPM device market will reach a valuation of $760m by 2030, up from around $550m in 2020.
Key players in the RPM space include Masimo, which recently extended its partnership with Philips to advance patient access to monitoring and measurement technologies; and US-based VitalConnect, which raised $100m earlier this year to expand its commercial presence in the US.
Practitioner feedback and research around RPM systems’ use in hospitals is positive, with a study sponsored by digital health provider MD Revolution finding that RPM systems can be used to cut 30-day cardiovascular readmissions by half. Despite this, reimbursement for remote care tools in the US has not kept pace with the rate of innovation.
According to GlobalData’s medical analyst David Beauchamp, digital health technologies such as RPM have evolved faster than the industry and reimbursement have been able to.
As a result, more widespread use of these devices is “dependent on whether the industry is willing to incorporate the use of such devices into existing treatment plans, and if reimbursement policies are updated to include digital health”, according to Beauchamp.
