As part of the Venturebeam Venture Impact Score (VIS) Founder Series, we speak with founders building companies that combine commercial growth with meaningful impact.
This week, we’re featuring EnteraSense, an Irish medtech company transforming the diagnosis of upper gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding through PillSense™ – a non-invasive diagnostic capsule designed to deliver rapid, evidence-based clinical decision support.
We spoke with Donal Devery, Founder & CEO, about improving emergency care, reducing diagnostic uncertainty, and the future of GI triage.
What problem did EnteraSense set out to solve, and why was it important to address?
EnteraSense set out to resolve an age-old clinical problem and eliminate the diagnostic uncertainty that clinicians face on a day-to-day basis when a patient presents with suspected upper GI bleeding.
Historically, triage has relied on probabilistic risk scoring, forcing clinicians to adopt a highly conservative “admit and see” posture. By introducing an objective, real-time diagnostic signal at the bedside, we are transforming a very subjective outcome into an evidence-based pathway decision. PillSense is being advocated by leading KOLs as the “5th Vital Sign” for GI Bleeding.
How is PillSense changing patient care and clinical decision-making in practice?
PillSense acts as an operational triage instrument that fundamentally changes three critical clinical decisions: emergency department discharge, endoscopy prioritization, and out-of-hours escalation.
By providing a binary “Blood Detected/No Blood Detected” readout in just 10 minutes without sedation, it allows hospitals to safely defer low-risk patients, concentrate scarce 24-hour endoscopy capacity on confirmed bleeds, and significantly reduce unnecessary, costly inpatient bed-days.
Looking ahead, what milestone, clinical outcome, or achievement best demonstrates the impact of PillSense to date, and what does it tell us about the future of emergency GI care?
Our impact is best demonstrated by the compounding weight of our peer-reviewed clinical and economic evidence, notably Akiki’s prospective trial establishing a 97.8% Negative Predictive Value, alongside newly published cost-effectiveness data showing significant reductions in both hospital admissions and urgent endoscopies.
This tells us that the future of emergency GI care belongs to non-invasive triage infrastructure embedded directly into standard hospital protocols and workflows.
Moving forward, our key milestone is the execution of our current financing round, which will accelerate our U.S. anchor-site integration to operationalise PillSense and enable our upcoming European rollout.
Looking ahead, EnteraSense is focused on expanding U.S. hospital adoption while accelerating its planned European rollout, with a vision of making non-invasive triage a standard part of emergency GI care.
Thank you to Donal Devery and the entire EnteraSense team for sharing their journey as part of the Venture Impact Score (VIS) Founder Series. We look forward to following the company’s continued progress as it advances innovation in emergency diagnostics.
Venturebeam is currently supporting EnteraSense’s growth funding round as the company continues its commercial expansion across the U.S. and Europe.
