The coagulation lab that fits in your hand. One drop of blood, the whole clotting story, ten minutes - wherever the patient happens to be bleeding.
Somewhere right now a paramedic is kneeling over a trauma patient with a question that has no good answer: is this person clotting, or bleeding out? Get it wrong in either direction and you do harm. The honest reply, for most of medical history, has been a shrug and a phone call to a lab thirty minutes away. Abram Scientific exists to replace that shrug with a number.
The company is small - seven people in Menlo Park, California - and it is building one thing with stubborn focus: a handheld meter called CoagCare that reads how a patient's blood clots, in full, from a single drop, in under ten minutes. No centrifuge. No lab bench. No quiet, vibration-free room. Just an answer, at the bedside, while it still matters.
Coagulation is a cascade - a choreographed sequence where blood goes from liquid to gel and, eventually, breaks back down. Doctors have long had a good way to watch this: viscoelastic testing, the family of machines known as thromboelastography. The catch is where those machines live. They sit in central labs, they need trained technicians, they are sensitive to vibration, and they take thirty to sixty minutes to report. A bleeding patient operates on a much shorter clock.
Uncontrolled hemorrhage is one of the leading causes of early death in trauma. In an emergency, clinicians often have to guess at transfusions and reversal agents because the data they need is still spinning in a centrifuge somewhere else. That gap - between where the test is and where the patient is - is the entire reason Abram Scientific got built.
Dr. Abhishek Ramkumar founded Abram Scientific and invented the CoagCare platform. The bet was unfashionably hardware-heavy in a software-obsessed valley: that you could shrink an entire coagulation laboratory into a meter and a disposable card, and - the harder part - make it work while moving. Most viscoelastic instruments are delicate enough to be disturbed by footsteps. Ramkumar's design is engineered to be vibration-insensitive, which is a polite way of saying it can run inside a helicopter.
The company spent its early years funded not by venture capital but by the U.S. government, which tends to be interested in devices that work where the ground is unstable and the patient is far from a hospital. Grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense paid for the science. By the time investors arrived, Abram Scientific had quietly assembled a portfolio of 17 granted U.S. and international patents - more granted patents than employees.
CoagCare is a wireless handheld meter paired with single-use test cards. You apply a drop of blood; the device measures both the viscoelasticity and the density of that blood as it clots. Most platforms capture a slice of this picture. CoagCare aims to characterize the entire cascade - from the first strands of clot formation through fibrinolysis, the point where the clot dissolves - and to do it in under ten minutes.
A portable, vibration-insensitive reader designed for trauma bays, ambulances, and MEDEVAC flights - not just the lab.
One drop of blood, measuring viscoelasticity and density together for a full coagulation readout.
Versus the 30-60 minutes typical of central-lab viscoelastic testing. The clock is the whole point.
Helps differentiate direct-acting oral anticoagulants and identify the right reversal agent in an emergency.
It is, in a sense, a razor-and-blades business dressed in a lab coat: a durable meter plus a recurring stream of disposable cards. The device is not yet FDA cleared - the company is working toward 510(k) clearance - so for now CoagCare is a very well-funded promise with a lot of patents behind it.
Abram Scientific's first SBIR award lands, kicking off government-funded development of the CoagCare science.
A medical research grant to build a portable viscoelastic platform for COVID-19-associated coagulopathy management.
NSF and DoD funding accumulates with a perfect Phase I to Phase II SBIR conversion rate, and the patent count climbs to 17.
Octapharma AG leads the round, with University of Colorado Anschutz-affiliated investors. Next stop: clinical milestones and FDA 510(k).
The most telling endorsement is the lead Series A investor. Octapharma AG is one of the world's largest makers of human-plasma products - a company that lives and breathes blood. When a plasma giant writes the lead check for a blood-analysis startup, it is a signal about more than money. Alongside it sit investors affiliated with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, a serious trauma-research institution.
Abram Scientific states its purpose plainly: precision blood management for better clinical outcomes. Underneath the phrase is a specific ambition - to move coagulation diagnostics out of the central laboratory and to the point of care, so a clinician can give the right therapy, to the right patient, at the right time and dose. The military framing is not incidental. The platform is being shaped against far-forward surgical needs, where size, weight, and portability decide what is even possible.
The competition is real and established - the viscoelastic incumbents and the entire habit of sending blood to a central lab. Abram Scientific is not trying to make a slightly faster lab machine. It is trying to make the lab unnecessary for one urgent question.
Return to that paramedic, kneeling over the trauma patient, holding the question with no good answer. In the world Abram Scientific is building, the shrug becomes a procedure: a drop of blood, a card, a meter, and within ten minutes a real readout of how that patient is clotting. The transfusion decision stops being a guess. The reversal agent stops being a gamble.
That world is not here yet. There is an FDA clearance to earn and clinical milestones to hit, and promising hardware has a long history of being humbled by reality. But the bet is clean and the backers are serious. Abram Scientific has spent years answering one question well. Now it has $11.75 million to put that answer where the bleeding actually happens.
Profile compiled from public sources. Figures are company-stated or press-reported and approximate where noted.