NorthView Acquisition Corp (NVAC)

[Devolution]

Abbott Laboratories (NYSE:ABT), DexCom (NASDAQ:DXCM) Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) appear to be the leaders in the blood sugar testing market among listed companies as they have a number of popular products in circulation under multiple brands.

Abbott’s FreStyle Libre, Medtronic’s Guardian Connect and DexCom’s G6 provide the wearable continuous monitoring like the Lumee, while private competitor Ascensia has a similar device.

As such, although these competitors don’t appear to have the same government backing, they do have a head start and significant resources at their disposal. Even these smallest of the group, DexCom, has a $44 billion market cap.
Profusa may be able to rake in recurring government revenues down the road from its devices, but it has to get commercialized and the chips in the population first.

...the Lumee came out of DARPA’s SIGMA+ program. This program was set up to fund projects designed to expand US national defense institutions’ “advance capability to detect illicit radioactive and nuclear materials by developing new sensors and networks that would alert authorities to chemical, biological, and explosives threats as well.”

Effectively, SIGMA+ is hoping to use connected humans as a “a common network infrastructure” and therefore allow governments to react to “chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high-yield explosive” attacks the way network operators respond to cyberattacks – in theory, anyway.

Phase I of this program is to develop the sensors, while the second phase is to focus on “network development, analytics and integration” of the connected humans. This may sound like a Bond movie plot, but, to Profusa’s credit, it has been open about its government ties from the start. In fact, Profusa Software and Systems Lead Keven Zhao was named a DARPA Riser in 2018.