Univa Health has raised £1 million in a pre-seed investment round.
The London firm has developed a digital care platform to transform how healthcare systems manage and treat eating disorders while improving the lives of those affected.
The round was led by Germany-based YZR Capital and backed by Austria-based Calm/Storm Ventures, two of Europe’s most active HealthTech investors.
It will support the development and commercialisation of Univa’s platform, set to launch in early 2025, and fund its first clinical study, in collaboration with the NHS, which begins in October.
The firm was co-founded by CEO Rich Andrews – founder of mental health and neurodevelopmental digital clinic Healios – and CTO Jose Santos.
After Santos’s wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), he co-founded Indivi in 2017 to build dreaMSMD, the world’s first CE-marked digital biomarker platform to help patients with MS and their neurologists to better track and manage their condition.
Univa says that over the past five years, hospital admissions for eating disorders have surged by 84% in the UK and 121% in the US, highlighting the urgent need to tackle the devastating impact of inaccessible and ineffective care.
In 2023 alone, nearly 30,000 people in the UK were admitted to hospital for eating disorders, with stays typically lasting three to four months. Despite the need for early intervention, the NHS is only able to provide care for 10% of adults with eating disorders, while nearly half of urgent cases for children waited more than 12 weeks for treatment.
Univa addresses these challenges by offering a range of digital tools to enhance the management, monitoring and treatment of eating disorders. These include tailored therapeutic programs, AI-driven health monitoring features and real stories from individuals who have lived through eating disorders, delivered through interconnected apps for both patients and their carers.
Clinicians can also use the platform’s professional portal to create tailored treatment plans and monitor patient well-being in real time.
“The widening gap between the need for care and available resources, along with the lack of personalised treatment options, urgently requires a radical rethink of how eating disorder care is provided,” said Andrews.
“Our goal is to revolutionise care pathways, providing tools that empower clinicians and deliver meaningful results. We aim to keep people out of hospital and enable better long-term recovery while saving costs for the healthcare system.
“Univa’s platform will augment the overwhelmed clinical workforce by providing evidence-based tools to reach more patients and families, enabling earlier intervention, improved monitoring, and faster recovery.”