TidalSense (formerly Cambridge Respiratory Innovations), a Cambridge-based AI-powered respiratory diagnostic, today announced a €16.6 million ($19 million) funding round to accelerate commercialisation in the UK and support globalisation of the technology, including to the USA. The round included investment from new investor Cross-Border Impact Ventures, and returning investors BGF, Airstream
Rahul Raj
TidalSense (formerly Cambridge Respiratory Innovations), a Cambridge-based AI-powered respiratory diagnostic, today announced a €16.6 million ($19 million) funding round to accelerate commercialisation in the UK and support globalisation of the technology, including to the USA.
The round included investment from new investor Cross-Border Impact Ventures, and returning investors BGF, Airstream Capital, and Foresight Group. This brings the company’s total funding to €35.1 million ($40 million), including €9.6 million ($11 million) grant funding from Innovate UK, SBRI, NIHR, and Asthma-Lung UK. In 2023, the company closed an €8.6 million fundraising round led by investors BGF and Downing.
Dr. Ameera Patel, CEO of TidalSense, said, “Respiratory disease has been neglected by governments and health systems for years, often overshadowed by cancer and cardiovascular disease, even though it affects one in five people. That’s finally starting to change. The World Health Organisation now recognises COPD as a global health priority, and it’s about time. Part of the problem has always been how we talk about it: COPD is widely seen as a smoker’s disease, but a quarter of cases come from air pollution and the biomass fuel millions still cook with every day.”
Founded in 2013, TidalSense builds AI-driven diagnostic and monitoring solutions for respiratory medicine built on the foundation of the company’s novel patented sensor technology, N-Tidal.
The company states that COPD is the UK’s third biggest cause of death, killing around 30,000 people a year. It further notes that it costs the NHS €2.2 billion (£1.9 billion) annually and that over half of NHS regions lack the capacity to meet current demand for spirometry testing. An estimated 1.9 million people are living with the condition, diagnosed and undiagnosed combined.
The company also highlights that at least 600k people in the UK are currently waiting for a formal COPD diagnosis. The test they are waiting for – spirometry – requires forceful exhalation, specialist training to administer, and can take nearly an hour per patient when factoring in wait and recovery time.
TidalSense claims to have built an alternative. N-Tidal Diagnose requires patients to breathe normally into a handheld device for 75 seconds, capturing a CO₂ waveform — a capnogram — of the kind traditionally used in critical care, which a set of AI models analyses to detect COPD.
The company notes that any healthcare professional can be trained to use the device in 10 minutes, with no specialist qualification required. Its AI diagnostic models have been trained on more than 2.5 million patient breaths.
TidalSense reported that, in the first post-market validation of the device, presented at the European Respiratory Society Congress in 2025 and conducted on a completely unseen patient cohort, N-Tidal Diagnose achieved over 90% performance across all key metrics of diagnostic accuracy.
“We’re still diagnosing in the 21st century with a test invented in the 1800s, and one that needs specialist equipment and training most of the world doesn’t have access to. Lower income and minority communities pay the price for that first. That’s the gap we want to close at TidalSense, and the NHS is the first place we’re doing it,” added Dr. Patel.
In March 2025, N-Tidal Diagnose software became the first non-spirometry AI diagnostic device to receive a CE mark under the EU MDR (Class IIa) for COPD. It was launched into the NHS in September 2025.
It was commissioned by Suffolk and North-East Essex Integrated Care Board, and its use has since expanded into NHS Wales, community lung screening clinics in the South of England, and now into Glasgow.
Donna Parr, Managing Partner at Cross-Border Impact Ventures, said, “We look for technology that doesn’t just have a compelling story, but a body of clinical evidence behind it. TidalSense has both, with a CEO who has lived the problem she’s solving, and a product that’s already live within the NHS healthcare environment, saving time for patients who have waited years for an answer. It is also technology that can improve access to appropriate treatment for COPD sufferers on a global basis and especially for women who are often misdiagnosed. This is exactly the kind of impact we want to make with our investments.”
TidalSense has deepened its senior bench ahead of the US expansion, with Andrew Wheeler, Director of Market Access and Public Policy, joining from NICE; Eric Mayes, Non-Executive Director, who was founding CEO of Endomagnetics; and Donna Parr, who joins the board with more than 30 years of tech and health tech investment experience.
