Epitel - From Research to $26 Million Series B

Epitel just closed a $26 million Series B to expand remote wireless EEG monitoring, and Mark Lehmkuhle, the company's CTO and founder, and J Carroll, its Director of Software Engineering and Architecture, join DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman to talk through how the technology got out of the lab and into the world.

Mark describes Epitel as a machine learning company for detecting neurological disorders that happens to build its own wireless wearable EEG sensor, a small chicklet-sized device with two gold electrodes that sticks to the scalp with a single piece of adhesive and conductive hydrogel. The hardware, in his framing, is the means to an end, because the product is really about converting a huge stream of data into clinically actionable information. The origin traces back to a decades-old NIH anti-seizure screening program at the University of Utah, where capturing rare seizure events in rodent models meant recording EEG around the clock for nearly the lifetime of the animal. Nothing existed to do that, so they built it, using a concept borrowed from the wireless tire pressure monitor in a car, with thumbnail-sized transmitters that could record continuously for six months.

The conversation gets into the electrode research behind the current product, including recreating a study from the early 1970s to determine the minimum number of electrodes needed to still see the electrographic signature of a seizure, which came down to four locations, and a second study on how close together those electrodes can sit. Mark also explains why any of this matters commercially, since self-reporting remains the primary outcome measure in many trials and is roughly fifty-fifty at best.

The rest is about the part Mark says is genuinely hard, which is human factors rather than the tech stack. Their users run from neonates to people in their 90s, seizure forecasting raises the question of what a percentage chance means to any individual, and a sensor nobody wears produces no data at all. J talks about garbage in and garbage out, why knowing a recording is bad beats not knowing, and why usability is a first class citizen on his engineering team. Grant and DeAndre add the lily pad analogy for small companies that cannot cross the pond in one jump, why Epitel's first FDA clearance was a milestone rather than a sellable product, why connected devices are never finished as long as they are supported, and why a little ignorance may be the only thing that gets a first-time founder to launch at all.