Madison, Wisconsin-based EnsoData has raised $550,000 in a round led by HealthX Ventures for its sleep data analysis software. The startup has already gone through a fellowship with Y Combinator and graduated from Gener8or’s gBeta accelerator.

EnsoData CEO and Cofounder Chris Fernandez told MobiHealthNews that he and Sam Rusk, EnsoData’s COO and other cofounder, met as undergraduate students at University of Wisconsin Madison. Both Fernandez and Rusk were interested in launching a startup that would  use machine learning to analyze health data. They spoke to doctors from more than 80 different specialties and decided to focus initially, at least, on sleep. 

The company’s first product, a web application called EnsoSleep that analyzes sleep data, began as a research effort at the University of Wisconsin. EnsoSleep is designed for sleep clinics ranging in size from small private practices to large integrated health systems.

“Sleep tests takes anywhere between one to two hours to review,” Fernandez said. “That’s kind of the scoring process where they look through between six and eight hours of data and find all of the physiological events that are needed to diagnose sleep apnea. We can save clinics hundreds of hours on a monthly basis. That is time that could be used to work directly with patients.”

The interface, Fernandez explained kind of looks like Dropbox. Patients are given a sleep test and data is either collected in the lab with the supervision of a tech or it’s collected at home. After that, researchers can upload the sleep data to EnsoSleep, which is often in a standardized format called EDF. From there, EnsoSleep will processes the data and the analysis will be re-downloaded back into native viewing software that comes with the sleep device.

EnsoData will use some of the funds to hire for the company’s data science and sales teams. The company also plans to submit an application for FDA 510(k) clearance.