Project summary

HELGEN is for-profit startup building biosurveillance infrastructure for governments and institutions to detect and predict diseases in the air on-site, rapidly. This enables operators to proactively anticipate and react to biological outbreaks / contaminations.

We're seeking $300k USD in operating capital to build our first MVP (autonomous, remote molecular diagnostics hardware), hire our founding team, and ultimately eliminate our cash flow constraints which limit our ability to better prepare humanity for the next biological disaster.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The Problem: The world is not prepared for the next biological threats. Current detection method rely heavily on manual work which is slow, expensive and reactive, making them ineffective for real-time threat detection. Society lacks the capability to arm themselves against these threats, especially in this increasingly destabilized world, as shown during COVID-19 times.

Our Solution: We believe that the future of biosurveillance should be automated and on-site. We build hardware that is able to sample air, process the sample, do molecular diagnostics all in one machine. This enables epidemiologists and authorities to get real-time, spatiotemporally-relevant data to react faster to pandemic / bioterrorism, minimizing casualties.

We also build AI model (trained using collected epidemiological data) to help operators anticipate outbreak and devise countermeasure.

Current Constraint: We are struggling to secure lab space and go full-time on building our first MVP, despite strong traction from various industries / governmental bodies. This forces us to delay pilot deployment.

How will this funding be used?

• Renting lab space and buying equipments / materials to build MVP.

• Hiring our first founding members to build the MVP (automated hardware + software dashboard).

• Operational: attending events, conferences + establishing partnerships.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

• Gian Leonardo: Founder.

  • Background in biotech @TUM, Sales GTM @AI packaging startup, VC/analyst.

  • Experience in molecular diagnostics, sales GTM @AI packaging startup, VC/analyst.

  • Part of research project designing a cheap and fast molecular detection method of nosocomial infection-causing bacteria.

• Will Fischer: Hardware Engineer.

  • Background in mechanical engineering.

  • Experience across various startups as first hire for prototyping, mechanical design engineering.

• Matthew William Lux: Bioengineer.

  • Background in electrical engineering and molecular biology.

  • Experience in biologist researcher at US and UK CBRN Army division, designing molecular diagnostics device for military applications.

• Vinith Gollapudi: Biomedical Engineer

  • Background in biomedical engineering @ICL

  • Experience in across various biomedical startups in product management, engineering, and operations.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

• Running out of capital before technology ready for deployment.

• Failing at gaining initial traction to generate revenue in the short-term, in order to develop and troubleshoot our technology.

• Potential regulation hurdles in device deployment.

Outcome if project fails: we will need to raise extra capital, be it equity-based or grants.

Mitigation: we remain operationally-lean, focus on engineering, rapid deployment, and agile customer pilot deployment.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

We are currently raising our first pre-seed & angel round. Currently talking with some VCs and syndicates in the biological risks / resilience space.