A New Vital Sign for Heart Failure with Filip Peters

In this episode of the Crux of Cardio, host Jordan Bergen sits down with Filip Peters, Co-founder and CEO of Acorai, to unpack how his team is building a non-invasive device that reads the pressures inside the heart, using machine learning inspired by oil and gas diagnostics.

Filip shared the full founder journey: from garage prototypes in Sweden through COVID, to a 1,600-patient study across six countries and FDA Breakthrough Device designation.

He explained why Acorai chose to focus on the hospitalised heart failure workflow over remote monitoring, and broke down the economics that make every heart failure admission a loss for US hospitals.

Filip also discussed the challenges of fundraising in today's market, navigating EU MDR as an AI-enabled device, and his advice for cardiovascular founders on staying in "science project mode" for as long as possible.

Key Topics:

• The transition from finance and ML into medtech entrepreneurship
• How non-invasive haemodynamic monitoring works and why it matters
• Inpatient vs. remote monitoring, why Acorai chose the hospital workflow
• The economics of heart failure admissions and the 20x ROI case
• Navigating FDA Breakthrough Device designation and the TAP Pilot programme
• EU MDR challenges for AI-enabled medical devices
• Fundraising strategy – raising over $50M and the role of strategic investors
• Go-to-market: selling directly to US hospital operational expense budgets

Related Insights:

• Cross-industry inspiration: applying signal detection from oil & gas and engine diagnostics to cardiac data
• The "gold standard" problem: inherent measurement error in right heart catheterisation and what it means for AI validation
• Why clinical workflow friction kills more medtech products than bad technology
• Health system venture funds as an emerging capital source for cardiovascular startups
• The value of the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator and EIC Accelerator for European founders

Core Challenges:

• Current non-invasive tools for estimating cardiac pressures (echo, biomarkers, X-ray) are subjective, often lagging, and vary significantly between clinicians – leading to suboptimal therapy decisions and premature discharge of heart failure patients with residual congestion.
• Acorai has developed a non-invasive, ML-powered sensing platform that measures both left-sided and right-sided cardiac pressures, giving clinicians a repeatable, operator-independent haemodynamic assessment, targeting better decongestion, shorter length of stay, and lower readmission rates.

Tune in now to hear how Acorai is turning oil rig science into the next vital sign for heart failure management.