Seer Medical increases awareness around epilepsy

Impact-based business Seer Medical aims to increase awareness of epilepsy through its take-home kit to help diagnose the disease without having to enter the hospital system.

Damien Kenny, chief of staff at Seer Medical discussed with Digital Nation the company’s for-purpose agenda and how it uses the backing of an impact fund to create change for those with epilepsy and doctors that diagnose the disease.

Kenny said he wanted to bring the hospital service to patients’ homes.

“Our impact in society is to take what would be at a hospital service getting a diagnostic study, which could last seven days in a hospital environment to work out when someone has epilepsy or what is the nature of their epilepsy,” he explained.  

“We were wanting to look to disrupt that and put that service line into the home because of some incredible bottlenecks and inaccessibility issues that people would confront.”

Kenny said they are not only seeing their company grow but also seeing the awareness around epilepsy increasing.

“One of the unique things about us as a business is that our entire proposition was born out of deep research, a lot of alignment with academia and a lot of applied translational research,” he said.

“What we're finding is because of our ongoing commitments, ongoing research and being party to global networks of researchers, we are having conversations outside of our commercial agenda around the future of epilepsy, the future of technology applied to epilepsy.”

Kenny said while the company may not be commercially viable yet, they are identifying trends they might need to consider into the future.

“What that does is it sets up a special relationship for us because we have a commercial engine. We have a product in market solution in the market which is highly impactful. But the next wave of innovation is coming through,” he said.

Impact investment fund Giant Leap is an investment company that has funded Seer Medical.

Kenny said Giant Leap and Seer Medical had aligning values when it came to being a for-purpose business. Looking at the impact investing industry, Kenny said there is much more opportunity for impact-driven businesses.

“We were fortunate that we also aligned on values as well. We knew that there were synergies between us not just impact that we could create but we would also benefit as a portfolio company, from the stewardship as it were from Giant Leap,” he said.

Kenny explained how they work with Giant Leap.

“We get a lot of great advice from the partners there. We are evolving our theory of change, we're evolving of being a better business in terms of ESG and we're learning which things we should measure to truly have an impact,” he said.