Decorte Future Industries is a Cambridge, UK-based deep tech company that extracts human health data from sound.

Team

  • Roeland Decorte

    CEO & Founder

    BA/MA, MPhil, PhD from the University of Cambridge; doctoral work on code-breaking cited by world experts. Started Decorte as a solo founder, engineered initial exoskeleton tech, sensors and AI-controls over two years full-time before incorporating the company and gathering the team. Originally joined Cambridge as youngest of his nation in its 800-year history.

  • Erika Bondareva

    CTO

    PhD in ML at the Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence at Cambridge. Holds an MRes in Sensor Technologies and Applications from Cambridge and MEng in Biomedical Engineering from Glasgow. Doctoral work on “Machine Learning on wearables for efficient cardiovascular health diagnostic and progression through audio signals.”

  • Jasbir Singh

    Head of Software

    BA/MA mathematics from Cambridge. Senior full-stack software developer with 7 years full-stack experience, having worked for high-profile startups and corporates (Builder.ai, Qonto), as well as having run his own software consultancy firm. Selected by Techstars London 2020 as London’s top dev to mentor the year’s cohort, after which he joined Decorte.

  • Kayla Butkow

    Machine Learning Engineer

    PhD in ML at the Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence at Cambridge. Holds an MRes in Sensor Technologies and Applications from Cambridge and degrees in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand. Doctoral work on “Earables for audio-based physiological sensing”.

  • Vijay Venkataramani

    Machine Learning Engineer

    Research MS in Computational Natural Sciences at Centre for Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics, specialising in Machine Learning for Healthcare, at IIIT Hyderabad. Has previously worked on Google's AI for Social Good Initiative, building an AI Enabled Home Care System as an ML developer, and as a software developer for an early-stage startup.

  • Teodora Moiseanu

    Data Collection & Founder’s Associate

    PhD in Chemistry at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry at Cambridge. Holds an MSci in Chemistry from the University of Glasgow. Doctoral work on “Molecular encapsulation of conjugated polymers for organic electronics”.

Board & Investor Board

  • Susan Standiford

    CTO IKEA, CTO Disney Online, Director of Engineering at Oracle, VP of Technology at Travelocity, CPTO Stepstone

    Board Member

    “Roeland and the DFI team are doing extremely interesting things for convergence science - they’re inventing and creating capabilities that will have broad effects on health monitoring across markets.

  • Trupen Modi

    Sr Director of Digital Healthcare Microsoft

    Board Observer

    “The Decorte team have built a market differentiator product that will transform the healthtech landscape. Integrating with existing infrastructure, their engine can identify and monitor alignments, resulting in efficient data collection as well as early detection and intervention. I personally believe this team is extremely talented and will generate substantial revenue.”

  • Mike Muller

    Co-Founder & CTO ARM

    Investor

    “I’m excited to see products and services that can help address the pressing problems of cost and quality in care. These issues will only increase in the coming years with our changing demographics and pressure on health care budgets. Intelligent technology underpinned by Machine Learning such as Decorte’s is the only way to address these challenges at scale.“

  • Gordon Hollingworth

    CPO & co-CTO Raspberry Pi

    Board Member

    “Roeland and the Decorte team have built an unrivalled technology suite in their mission to democratise access to complex health data. Having been part of their journey from the very beginning I have no doubt they are headed for tremendous success.”

  • Eamonn Carey

    MD Techstars London, GP Tera Ventures, GP The Fund

    Board Member

    “I saw Roeland for the first time on the BBC and was immediately struck by their personality and character and passion for what they were building. As we were getting feedback from external assessors and people who were looking at the pitches, I got a number of messages saying we would be insane not to invest in this company. And I agreed - I have been writing and tweeting and talking about the need for this kind of tech for ages.”

  • Hugo Chardon

    Co-founder AMROCK Ventures

    Board Observer

    “Decorte is revolutionizing the way to listen to the human body. Their AI engine which uses Machine Learning algorithms to extract human biometric data directly from audio is ground-breaking and opens up various commercial avenues.”

  • William Casey King

    Sr Director of AI Strategy Microsoft, Director Capstone Program Yale University, AI Next Campaign DARPA, “Big Data” initiative Obama Administration

    Investor

    ”I am truly excited by the nature of the technology the Decorte team is building, which I believe is unique in its field in terms of depth and execution. That is why I’m investing, and why I am currently actively supporting their clinical studies and expansion into the US”

  • Ashish Parikh

    Founder Heart and Vascular Clinics Newark, Middletown and Wilmington, American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, American College of Physicians

    Chair, Clinical Advisory Board

    “I’ve calculated that Decorte’s technology would save the average patient of my clinics roughly $20K in clinical and hospitalisation costs, per patient, and optimise clinic workflows about 15-30%, all without mentioning the vastly better outcomes for patients. I am excited to host and help run Decorte’s US-based clinical studies so that their technology can become available to the tens of thousands of patients my clinics serve.

About Decorte

Over the course of two years full-time work after his doctorate in ancient codebreaking, the company’s founder, Dr Roeland P-J E Decorte, invented, engineered, and brought to proof-of-concept the company’s initial technology - an exoskeleton that included AI controls and a novel biometric sensor architecture. The aim was to enable a new, efficient way to gather and upload biometric data directly from human bodies into the cloud.

At the time just a one-man band, Decorte’s exoskeleton technology attracted the interest and ultimately endorsement of the UK Ministry of Defence and UK government in 2019-2020. Over the course of 2020, however, Decorte decided to move away from defence and exoskeletons to focus on a version of the technology that was more accessible to the general public - where the greatest need, and largest market, is and was.

In the summer of 2020, Decorte was selected, uniquely for a one-person company, from tens of thousands of companies worldwide to join Techstars’ London accelerator, thus successfully raising its first $120K equity financing. At the same time, the UK government decided to invest in Decorte through its innovation grants arm, funding two successive testing phases. During the Techstars programme, the company raised further capital from the co-founder and CTO of ARM, the CTO of IKEA, and other prominent US and UK-based investors.

Following its initial capital raise, Decorte started building out a world-class team. The company’s CTO, Erika Bondareva, at the time undertaking her PhD in sound-based AI at the University of Cambridge, joined to lead tech development in the fall of 2020. Over two years of R&D, the company built and examined the effects of an exoskeleton-derived smart shirt prototype using sound as its primary sensing modality, deployed in the care sector (Mark I, 2020-2021), built a scaled-down sound-based button device focused mainly on data gathering for AI creation (Mark II, 2022), and then used that data to create a world-changing AI engine (Sonus Engine, 2022 onward).

In May 2022, Decorte completed a $1.6M pre-seed round, with participation of London and Silicon Valley-based venture funds. Over the course of 2022 and 2023, Decorte partnered with Apollo Hospitals, one of the largest healthcare providers in the world, variously the largest in Asia, touching 200 million lives in 120 countries, as well as with three US-based clinics and one EU-based clinic, for a programme of clinical studies. These studies enable gathering the world’s largest dataset of its kind, itself supporting the building and training of a uniquely powerful AI.

Over the course of 2023 and 2024, two Microsoft executives, Microsoft’s Sr Director of Digital Healthcare and Sr Director of AI Strategy respectively, invested in the company and joined Decorte’s boards as observers. Others on the board include the former CTO of IKEA, Disney Online and the current CTO of Raspberry Pi. Decorte is currently partnering with Microsoft and Google, with the aim to see its technology on 3 billion smartphones by 2027.