Company Profile // Digital Health & Wearables
Sibel Health
Clinical-grade vital signs, minus the wires. A Chicago lab's bet that good health data shouldn't depend on your zip code.
Clinical-grade vital signs, minus the wires. A Chicago lab's bet that good health data shouldn't depend on your zip code.
No cart trailing behind. No tangle of cables clipped to a finger and taped to a chest. Just two soft sensors - one on the chest, one on the limb - quietly streaming heart rate, breathing, temperature and oxygen to a nurse's screen. That patient is wearing Sibel Health's ANNE One, and the absence of wires is the entire point.
Sibel Health builds clinical-grade wearable sensors paired with AI analytics and a cloud platform. The sensors are thin enough for a newborn's skin and rugged enough for an adult ICU. The company is small - roughly 120 people in Chicago - but its devices now show up in American hospitals, pharmaceutical clinical trials, and delivery rooms in Rwanda. The through-line is a registered trademark the founders repeat like a creed: Better Health Data for All.
Hospitals spent decades making monitors more powerful. Sibel asked a quieter question: what if the patient could just forget they were wearing one? The pitch, distilled
The machines that watch over patients are bulky, wired, and expensive. They live in intensive care units in well-funded hospitals. Step outside that bubble - into a general ward, a patient's home, a rural clinic in a low-income country - and continuous vital-sign monitoring largely disappears. A laboring mother in a low-resource setting may be checked every few hours by hand, if at all.
That gap is not academic. Most maternal and newborn deaths happen in places where the monitoring equipment never reaches. The technology to watch a heartbeat in real time has existed for years; the trouble is it was built for the cart, the wall socket, and the insurance code - not for the people most likely to die without it.
The vital-sign monitor was invented to save lives. Somewhere along the way it became furniture that only certain rooms could afford. The tension Sibel exists to resolve
Caption: The most advanced patient monitor in the world is useless in the room that doesn't have one.
In 2018, Sibel Health spun out of Northwestern University - specifically the lab of John A. Rogers, the materials scientist known for flexible, skin-like electronics. Dr. Steve Xu, a Northwestern dermatologist, took the CEO seat, joined by co-founders Ha Uk Chung and Jong Yoon Lee and several alumni of the Rogers group. Their bet was that soft, wireless sensors could deliver hospital-grade data while being comfortable enough to wear for days.
The early proof came from an unglamorous place: the neonatal intensive care unit, where the patients have the most delicate skin and the least tolerance for tangled wires. If a sensor could safely monitor a premature infant, it could monitor almost anyone. Then COVID-19 arrived, and the same wearable was strapped to frontline healthcare workers to catch early respiratory warning signs - work that drew a U.S. Department of Defense award.
A dermatologist, an engineer famous for bendable circuits, and a NICU full of the hardest patients to monitor. That was the starting line. How Sibel got off the ground
CEO and Northwestern-trained dermatologist who turned lab research into an FDA-cleared product line.
Materials scientist behind the soft, skin-interfaced electronics that make ANNE possible.
Engineer from the Rogers group, part of the team that productized the sensors.
Co-founder who helped translate academic prototypes into clinical hardware.
ANNE One is the flagship: a pair of soft sensors (ANNE Chest and ANNE Limb) that capture heart rate, respiratory rate, skin and body temperature, SpO2, pulse rate, even step and fall counts, then stream it all to a mobile app and cloud dashboard. It's cleared for patients 12 and older, and notably became one of the first devices cleared under the IEEE 11073 SDC interoperability standard - the plumbing that lets hospital systems actually talk to each other.
From that base, the family grows. ANNE Maternal is a fully wireless maternal-fetal monitoring platform. Discovery is the version pharmaceutical companies use to run clinical trials from a patient's living room. And an ARPA-H contract is funding a first-in-class wearable for continuous edema monitoring. The hardware is small; the ambition is not.
The same sensor that watches a premature infant also runs a drug trial in someone's living room. That is range. On the ANNE platform
Wireless continuous vital-sign monitoring for patients 12+, with alarms, alerts and a central station.
FDA-cleared, fully wireless maternal-fetal monitoring for labor and delivery.
Continuous at-home data collection for decentralized clinical trials.
ARPA-H-funded wearable for continuous edema monitoring - a first of its kind.
Sibel Health launches from John Rogers' lab with early seed support from the Gates Foundation.
Wearable respiratory-biomarker sensors deployed on frontline workers; recognized by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Funding to scale advanced wearable sensors for remote patient monitoring and hospital care.
Advancing ANNE Maternal for low- and middle-income countries; featured in the Gates annual letter.
Led by Steele Foundation for Hope with Drager. ANNE Maternal cleared; $3.5M ARPA-H edema contract awarded.
Maruho and Samsung Next join; Kimberly Querrey becomes Chairwoman.
Caption: Seven years, four countries, and one stubborn idea that good data shouldn't require a power outlet.
Skeptics are right to ask whether a soft sensor can carry real weight. The receipts: roughly $108M raised in total, a Series C that grew to $39M, and a cap table that now includes Drager, Samsung Next, Japan's Maruho, and the Steele Foundation for Hope. Northwestern Medicine has put ANNE One to work evaluating nursing workflow and patient sleep quality.
The global-health proof is harder to fake. The Gates Foundation backed Sibel early and later granted $17.5M-plus to push ANNE Maternal into low-resource settings, work highlighted in the foundation's annual letter. With the University of Edinburgh and the NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Global Surgery, ANNE Maternal is now deployed across India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Rwanda.
You can argue with a startup's hype. It's harder to argue with seven FDA clearances and a delivery room in Rwanda. The case for taking Sibel seriously
Plenty of companies put "for all" in a slide and quietly mean "for customers who can pay." Sibel registered the phrase and then spent grant money proving it - building lower-cost, AI-assisted versions of ANNE Maternal designed specifically for places with thin budgets and unreliable power. CEO Steve Xu frames the work around clinical-grade wearables and AI-driven algorithms reaching scale and reach they couldn't before.
It helps that the founders came from a research lab rather than a sales floor. The company reads as engineer- and scientist-led, with a global-health conscience running alongside the commercial hospital business. The two aren't in tension; the same sensor sells to a U.S. health system and ships to a clinic abroad.
Anyone can say "for all." Sibel registered the trademark, then went and wired up four countries to back it. On mission versus marketing
Return to that hallway. The patient still being monitored, walking without a cart in tow, is not a gadget demo - it's a preview of where care is heading. Hospital-at-home, decentralized drug trials, maternal monitoring in places that never had it: each depends on monitoring that travels with the person instead of pinning them to a wall.
Sibel Health is not the only company chasing wireless monitoring - VitalConnect, Masimo, BioIntelliSense and others are in the same race. But few are pointing the technology at both the American ICU and the Rwandan delivery room at once. That dual aim is the company's wager: that the most advanced version of this technology and the most accessible version can be the same product.
The wires are gone. The data keeps streaming. And the question Sibel started with - what if the patient could just forget they were wearing a monitor - is, increasingly, answered.
The future of patient monitoring is something you don't notice you're wearing. Sibel is betting the whole company on that sentence. The closing scene
Product demos and founder interviews live on the company's own channels and in press coverage - start here.