Pomegra
Valencia's iPremom closes a €15M seed round led by Amadeus Capital to commercialize MaiRa, a molecular diagnostics platform that flags preeclampsia risk from maternal blood as early as week nine of pregnancy.
- iPremom's MaiRa platform analyzes cell-free RNA from a single blood draw to predict preeclampsia risk months before symptoms appear.
- The €15M seed round, led by Amadeus Capital, also includes Asabys Partners and APEX Ventures.
- MaiRa was trained on over 26,000 samples from 10,000 pregnancies enrolled in Spain's PREMOM study - one of the country's largest prospective obstetric trials.
Lead
Valencia-based iPremom closed a €15 million seed round on September 2, 2026, led by Amadeus Capital Partners, with co-investment from Asabys Partners and APEX Ventures. The capital will fund commercial expansion in Spain, completion of additional clinical validation studies, and regulatory filings in the European Union and the United States for the company's flagship MaiRa diagnostic platform.
What Does MaiRa Actually Do?
MaiRa screens for the molecular precursors of preeclampsia - a hypertensive disorder that affects up to 8% of pregnancies worldwide and remains a leading cause of maternal and neonatal mortality - using a standard blood draw taken as early as gestational week nine. The platform identifies cell-free RNA signatures circulating in maternal blood and applies predictive modeling to stratify individual risk before any clinical signs emerge. Current standard-of-care screening, by contrast, relies on blood pressure readings and protein markers that typically surface in the second or third trimester, leaving little time for clinical intervention.
The distinction matters: identifying high-risk patients in the first trimester opens a therapeutic window. Low-dose aspirin, when started before week 16, has demonstrated meaningful reductions in early-onset preeclampsia in high-risk populations. MaiRa is designed precisely to widen that window.
Where Does the Science Come From?
The platform rests on more than a decade of research by co-founders Professor Carlos Simón, Chairman, and Dr. Tamara Garrido, Chief Scientific Officer. The PREMOM study - one of Spain's largest prospective pregnancy cohorts - generated the 26,000-plus samples across 10,000 pregnancies that underpin MaiRa's training data. That dataset scale is material in a field where small-cohort research frequently fails to replicate at a population level.
Before this seed round, iPremom had already secured a €2.5 million EU grant to prepare the test for commercialization, signaling early institutional confidence in the scientific foundation. The company currently offers MaiRa through its own laboratory in Spain, meaning this round accelerates a commercial operation already in motion rather than funding a purely pre-revenue concept.
Why Is Amadeus Capital Leading This?
Amadeus Capital Partners, a Cambridge-based deep-tech investor with a long track record in life sciences, took the lead position. The firm's involvement brings more than capital - its portfolio and regulatory networks are relevant as iPremom works toward CE marking in the EU and FDA engagement in the US. Asabys Partners, a Barcelona-based health-focused VC, and APEX Ventures, an Austrian early-stage fund, round out the syndicate, giving the company a mix of local ecosystem support and central European reach.
Valuation for the round was not disclosed.
What Does the Market Look Like for Prenatal Diagnostics?
The prenatal diagnostics space has attracted sustained investor attention, driven partly by the success of cell-free DNA-based non-invasive prenatal testing, or NIPT, which normalized the idea of extracting actionable fetal health information from maternal blood. iPremom is extending that logic from chromosomal anomalies to maternal disease risk - a distinct but adjacent problem with a larger addressable population, since preeclampsia risk applies to every pregnancy rather than subgroups defined by age or family history.
Competition is real. Several academic spinouts and diagnostics companies are pursuing first-trimester preeclampsia screening, including approaches that combine biomarkers such as placental growth factor, mean arterial pressure, and uterine artery pulsatility. MaiRa's cell-free RNA approach claims differentiation through earlier signal detection and a richer molecular fingerprint, but independent clinical validation at scale remains the critical test.
Outlook
iPremom enters a commercially active phase with a clinical dataset that compares well to typical seed-stage diagnostics companies. The near-term milestones are straightforward: complete validation cohorts, pursue EU regulatory approval, and extend the laboratory-based service in Spain while the regulatory pathway in the US matures. The harder question - how the test performs in an unselected population across diverse clinical settings, outside a Spanish academic cohort - will be answered by those validation studies. That is also what the next funding round will likely be used to prove.
