Sepsis Scout
Winter 2018AcquiredWearables and AI to predict and prevent sepsis outside the hospital
Pressure-test this opportunity
Turn this teardown into a decision-ready prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
Wearables and AI to predict and prevent sepsis outside the hospital
Turn this teardown into a decision-ready prompt for ChatGPT, Claude, or your agent.
If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about Sepsis Scout (W18).
Sepsis Scout (originally Patchd Medical) was a San Francisco-based medical technology startup founded in 2017 by Robert Quinn and Wei-Jien Tan. The company aimed to build a wearable patch that monitored vital signs in real-time and used deep learning algorithms to predict sepsis onset in high-risk patients outside the hospital. It participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch with a team of five people and raised approximately $2.88M in total funding before being acquired by Cytovale in October 2024.[1][8]
The company failed because it pursued a continuous-monitoring wearable for at-home sepsis detection that required FDA clearance and clinical adoption it never achieved. With only $2.88M raised and no disclosed revenue or clinical validation, Sepsis Scout lacked the runway to navigate the regulatory and adoption barriers inherent to medical devices. Its eventual acquisition by Cytovale—which had a superior FDA-cleared blood-based test—rendered Sepsis Scout's technology redundant, making the deal a talent and IP acquisition rather than a strategic product merger.
Image 1 / 2
Robert Quinn's path to Sepsis Scout began with a kidney transplant that left him with an acute bout of sepsis. Since then, he has suffered 18 episodes of the disease, which causes 1 in 5 deaths globally.[4] Rather than accept this as his fate, Quinn channeled his experience into building technology for early detection. In a 2022 podcast interview, Quinn explained his motivation: "A kidney transplant left me with an acute bout of sepsis. Since then I have suffered 18 episodes of this disease, which causes 1 in 5 deaths globally. Rather than take things lying down I started a company that is creating tech that can detect sepsis in its early stage, potentially saving millions of lives."[4]
Quinn's technical background combined mechatronics engineering and biomedical science from The University of Queensland, with stints as an Implant Engineer at Cochlear (2014–2015) and an Engineer at Telstra (2016–2017).[21] His co-founder, Wei-Jien Tan, brought complementary depth in machine learning and implantable medical devices. Tan had worked in a neuroscience lab applying ML to electrophysiological measurements from rat and monkey brains, then moved to implantable medical devices as an engineer writing firmware and doing electronic design.[3]
The two met while working in the implantable medical device space, where Tan was an engineer. According to Tan's YC profile, he "met cofounder Rob Quinn there and they started Patchd Medical which became Sepsis Scout."[3] The company was founded in 2017 in San Francisco under the name Patchd Medical, later renamed Sepsis Scout.[1]
The initial vision was ambitious: continuous monitoring of high-risk patients—particularly cancer patients—at home, using off-the-shelf wearables integrated with proprietary deep learning algorithms to predict sepsis onset before symptoms manifest.[7] The company filed two patents to protect its approach: one in February 2018 for subject monitoring (WO-2019165004-A1) and another in August 2019 for sepsis detection and monitoring (US-20210052218-A1).[15]
Read the complete post-mortem, the rebuild playbook, and the exact reasons Sepsis Scout is still worth studying now.