How Breath Biomarkers Reveal Disease: A Deeptech Founder’s Journey

With every breath we take, we exhale over 1000 unique molecules. That means there’s data in the very air that we breathe. Having taught machines to ‘hear’ and to ‘see’, a sense of smell is AI’s next frontier, and it’s a vital one. The molecular fingerprint of a single breath can reveal early signs of diseases such as breast cancer and Parkinson’s, quickly, non-invasively and cost effectively. Yet accurately detecting breath molecules comes with a lot of technological challenges; and the race is on to find out which team gets there first.

In his talk, Sven explains how his deeptech startup developed breakthrough laser spectrometer technology for diagnostics; outlines which tactics he used to attract funding for a medtech and why hardware is 10x more difficult than software, and describes how a pivot towards explainable machine learning ultimately helped him to succeed.