He had a plan to enter European politics. Then he picked a harder problem and moved it into a lab.
The face of a man who decided memos do not catch disease early - so he started building tests instead.
Luca Springer co-founded and runs Numen, the San Francisco company once called Cleancard, and the elevator line has not changed since the start: make cancer screening as easy as a pregnancy test.
The product is a strip of synthetic biology that reads biomarkers from a urine sample in roughly 30 minutes, no machinery and no waiting room required. It is built to be multiplexable and machine-readable, which is a deliberately unglamorous way of saying a phone camera and some software can do the part a lab usually does. The first screens are aimed at prostate, bladder, and ovarian cancers.
That is the company. The more interesting fact is who is selling it. Springer is not a lifelong biologist. He is a computer scientist whose academic specialty - computational game theory and network science - sits about as far from a wet lab as a discipline can. He came to the problem sideways, which turns out to be the point.
He started the company in 2021 with Thomas Carroll, a clinical cancer researcher he met years earlier at Oxford. Two years on, they went through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch. The team is small, around 19 people, and the money raised is modest by deep-tech standards, roughly $5.1M. Numen is a bet that detection is partly a software and systems problem, and that a founder fluent in both code and policy is the right person to make it.
The name changed from Cleancard to Numen along the way. The website still answers at cleancard.bio, which is the kind of small, honest detail a startup leaves behind when it is moving faster than its branding.
Making screening as easy as a pregnancy test.The line that has anchored the company since day one
Rewind to 2016. Springer is named a German Rhodes Scholar, one of a small group chosen worldwide that year. At the time the plan reads like a future cabinet bio: a German-Austrian dual citizen, troubled by the rise of the radical right in Europe, heading to Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government to study public policy. He told interviewers he wanted to enter politics and reshape European migration and education policy. Migration and education, he argued, were the two most pivotal ministries of the moment.
He got there on an unusual road. Before Oxford he had already finished a dual bachelor's degree, a BA in philosophy with a business-management concentration from Columbia and a BA in politics, law, and economics from Sciences Po. When he won the Rhodes, it was the first time in five years a Columbia student had.
At Oxford the plan quietly forked. Springer stacked a second discipline onto the policy track, picking up an MSc in computer science alongside his governance studies. Network science and computational game theory became his thing. That is the toolkit of someone who likes to model how complicated systems behave and where they break.
Healthcare, it turns out, is one enormous broken system. After Oxford he spent time at Stockdale Street, analyzing, investing in, and helping grow healthcare, consumer, and technology companies. The investor's seat gave him a wide-angle view of where the gaps were. The biggest gap was not treatment. It was catching things early enough to matter.
The parliament plan never happened. In its place is a company. The throughline from migration policy to molecular diagnostics is not as wide a leap as it sounds: both are about systems that fail the people who can least afford the failure. Springer just decided the lab was where he could actually fix one.
Numen's approach folds three disciplines into one strip of paper. Springer's bet is that the read-out is a software problem wearing a lab coat.
Named a German Rhodes Scholar and heads to Oxford, planning a career in European politics.
Studies governance and computer science at Oxford; meets future co-founder Thomas Carroll.
Works at Stockdale Street, investing in and growing healthcare, consumer, and tech companies.
Co-founds Cleancard with Carroll to make diagnostic testing simple enough to do at home.
Named a Schmidt Futures ISF Fellow; the company joins Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch.
Latest raise lands; the team operates as Numen, roughly 19 people strong in San Francisco.
The parliament plan never happened. A company did.On the detour from politics to the lab
Described as genuinely mission-driven rather than chasing attention - the kind of founder who would rather ship the test than do the press tour.
Policy, computer science, and biology are not three hobbies. They are one method: look at a system, find where it fails, build the missing piece.
He walked away from a fully-formed political plan to learn an entirely new field. Few people do that once. He did it on purpose.
Network science is the study of how things connect and cascade. He applies it to healthcare the way others apply it to social graphs.