See other companies on Welcome to the Jungle
Winterlight Labs
Monitoring cognitive impairment through speech
- 21-100 employees
- Healthcare
- B2B
- Artificial Intelligence
- MedTech
- Discovery District, Toronto, ON
Jump to section
Company mission
To improve the lives of people with dementia and psychiatric illness by building better, more sensitive tools that allow the tracking, screening and prediction of the onset of diseases more accurately.
22% employee growth in 12 months
Our take
Pencil-and-paper tests for cognitive impairments are often time-consuming, costly, and difficult to administer. Winterlight Labs has commercialized a proprietary language-based diagnostic system that analyzes natural speech to detect and monitor dementia, Alzheimer’s, aphasia, and various other cognitive conditions. The platform has applications in drug trials, long-term and primary care, and speech-language pathology.
Since its founding, Winterlight Labs has seen strong interest from pharmaceutical companies who view the technology as a major improvement in screening. The company has also gained support from the pan-Canadian AGE-WELL Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE), among many others.
In 2022, Winterlight Labs and memory clinic Alzheimer Center Amsterdam announced a partnership project to decentralise assessments of patients’ cognition and function in the study of preclinical Alzheimer’s disease. In the future, the company aims to extend its technology to additional healthcare areas, such as schizophrenia, and to add more languages to the software.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Sep 2021
$5.6m
SERIES A
Nov 2019
$4.3m
EARLY VC
Total funding: $11.4m
Leadership
Liam Kaufman
(Co-founder & CEO)Founder of Understoodit.com, experience as Lead Web Applications Developer for EventMobi, and as Research Associate for Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.
Maria Yancheva
(Co-founder & CTO)Taken part in research on computer science, computational linguistics and language & speech processing at the University of Toronto over a number of years. Experience as a software developer at Scotiabank Global Banking and Markets.
Frank Rudzicz
(Co-founder)Previous experience as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.