Avive Solutions Inc. has raised an additional $7 million in funding, bringing the total raised to over $15 million since the company’s inception in 2017. Focused on addressing the global public health issue of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), Avive is a developer of a next-generation automated external defibrillator (AED) coupled with a first-of-its-kind platform solution for out of hospital cardiac arrest response.
 
This round was led by new investor Laerdal Million Lives Fund, with participation from Kenko Venture Partners, Irish Angels, and numerous medical device executives and healthcare leaders from current and past companies such as ResMed, Hill-Rom, Evalve, and Northwestern Health. While Avive is in the midst of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review cycle, funding from this round will be utilized to allow the company to begin preparing for commercial launch upon FDA approval. In addition, the funds will accelerate the company’s development of its platform solution and integrations with the emergency response ecosystem to revolutionize out of hospital cardiac arrest response.
 
Avive was founded with the mission of significantly increasing the dismal survival rates from SCA, which is sudden death caused by an abnormality in the heart’s electrical system (national average survival rates are <10 percent and haven’t appreciably increased for more than two decades). SCA accounts for over 350,000 out of hospital deaths per year in the United States alone; it is the leading cause of death of people over age 40, and the leading cause of death for student-athletes. While cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) can help to “buy time,” a person in SCA must ultimately receive a high energy defibrillation shock delivered from an AED to survive. Immediate treatment is crucial, as every minute that a person goes without receiving a defibrillation shock reduces their chances of survival by 7 percent to 10 percent. Despite their best efforts, currently, the average response time of emergency medical services (EMS) in the United States is eight to 12 minutes, making immediate access to an AED and use of the device by a bystander critical for the survival of a person in SCA.
 
“Over the past two decades, despite the AED industry deploying millions of units throughout the U.S., there has been no meaningful increase in SCA survival rates across the country,” said Sameer Jafri, co-founder and president of Avive Solutions Inc. “For more than 20 years, the industry’s status quo approach to addressing this significant problem has been to deploy more and more hardware that has modest incremental feature improvements, without addressing the true problem that is inhibiting tens of thousands of additional lives from being saved every year - which is simply getting AEDs where they are needed, when they are needed.”
 
Avive is taking a fresh approach to addressing this decades-old problem by bringing the most advanced AED technology to market, coupled with a first-of-its-kind platform solution that is designed to integrate with the existing emergency response ecosystem to enable a quicker and more effective response. The company believes that this unique combination of deploying advanced but still accessible hardware, and novel software, has the potential to revolutionize out of hospital cardiac arrest response and massively impact SCA survival rates.
 
"By bringing data-driven connectivity in the form of an integrated software and device platform, we believe Avive can play a meaningful role across the chain of survival for cardiac arrest," said Jeff Trost, managing partner of Laerdal Million Lives Fund. "By building a superior AED which includes features that create accessible CPR training, and developing a new system to improve rapid defibrillation, while also creating a data link to professional first responders, we are excited about the life-saving technology and opportunity Avive has in front of them, and we are passionate about helping them bring their product to millions of SCA patients."
 
“We are excited to welcome such a strong group of new healthcare-focused investors to the Avive team, including Laerdal Million Lives Fund, who brings decades of experience pushing the forefront of the resuscitation market via their affiliation with Laerdal (a global leader in the medical education, training and resuscitation industry),” said Rory Beyer, co-founder and CEO of Avive Solutions Inc. “Since our inception, we have been focused on challenging the status quo of the AED industry, which has not gone far enough in building holistic solutions to increase cardiac arrest survival rates. The continued alignment and commitment between our investors, our team, and our partners drive our strategic development forward and allows us to focus on executing our mission as we build a much needed new paradigm for cardiac arrest response.”