Ultromics, a UK-based company developing AI for cardiac diagnostics, has received an investment from the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women Venture Fund. The amount was not disclosed.
The funding supports Ultromics’ EchoGo Heart Failure platform, an FDA-cleared AI that analyzes standard echocardiograms to detect heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). The technology has analyzed more than 430,000 echocardiograms and is used in hospitals across the U.S. and U.K.
HFpEF is the most common form of heart failure in the United States. Women are twice as likely as men to develop the condition, and up to 64% of cases go undiagnosed in clinical practice, according to the company. Symptoms including fatigue, shortness of breath, and swelling are often dismissed or attributed to aging, weight, or other conditions.
“Closing the diagnostic gap by recognizing disease before irreversible damage occurs is critical to improving health for women—and everyone,” said Tracy Warren, Senior Managing Director of the Go Red for Women Venture Fund. “We are gratified to see technologies, such as this one, that are accepted by leading institutions as advances in the field of cardiovascular diagnostics.”
Ultromics’ AI is trained on patient outcomes data rather than physician labels, which the company says enables it to identify early signs of disease across gender, age, and risk groups. In clinical studies, current HFpEF risk scores were non-diagnostic in 60% of patients, compared to EchoGo Heart Failure which reached a diagnostic decision in 93% of patients.
“Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction is one of the most complex and overlooked diseases in cardiology. For too long, clinicians have been expected to diagnose it using tools that weren’t built to detect it, and as a result, many patients are identified too late,” said Ross Upton, PhD, CEO and Founder of Ultromics. “By augmenting physicians’ decision making with EchoGo, we can help them recognize disease at an earlier stage and treat it more effectively.”
Ultromics was founded out of the University of Oxford and developed its platform in partnership with the NHS and Mayo Clinic. This is the second investment made by the Go Red for Women Venture Fund.
