How Precordior Spent Its EIC Accelerator Grant on Heart Scan Apps

Precordior's idea is simple to describe: a person lies down, places an ordinary smartphone on the chest for one minute, and the phone's gyroscope and accelerometer record the tiny rotations and vibrations of the beating heart. The Turku company sells the result as CardioSignal, an app that looks for signs of atrial fibrillation (AFib), the irregular heart rhythm behind many strokes. In the European Innovation Council's January 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot cut-off it won a grant to go further: to detect heart failure and coronary artery disease with the same phone, win regulatory approval, and launch across the EU, the US and China, according to CORDIS.

The EU contributed €1,962,625 towards a total cost of €2,803,750. Six years later the company is alive, has raised a $10 million Series A and published a large heart failure study. But the CardioSignal app on sale in 2026 is still certified for one condition, atrial fibrillation, according to the company's own certification announcement and website.

Where Precordior Stands in 2026

Precordior Oy is an active limited company with no liquidation or bankruptcy entries, registered at Aurakatu 6 in Turku, according to the Finnish Patent and Registration Office's open company data. The register shows it was entered in the trade register on 3 January 2017 and added "CardioSignal" as a trade name on 9 August 2022. Finder.fi lists the same business ID, founding date and trade names.

The company filed accounts for 2025 showing revenue of €1,741,000, up 62.0% on 2024, an operating loss of €1,015,000 and 28 employees, according to Asiakastieto. Vainu reports the same revenue, staff and an equity ratio of 90%, which Asiakastieto also gives. Its most recent public announcements came in November 2025, when it released its first app version under the EU Medical Device Regulation and won an insurer's innovation challenge, both reported on its news page.

The Technology: a Phone as a Heart Sensor

Doctors detect atrial fibrillation with an electrocardiogram (ECG), which records the heart's electrical activity, and diagnose coronary artery disease with tests such as CT angiography. Consumer alternatives such as smartwatches mostly read the pulse optically or need a separate ECG gadget. CardioSignal measures something different: the mechanical motion of the heart, using sensors already inside the phone. The method is called gyrocardiography when it uses the gyroscope and seismocardiography when it uses the accelerometer. The project's CORDIS report describes it as measuring "heart angular velocity and acceleration according to six parameters", with readings compared in the cloud against a database of known cardiac patterns.

The selling point is cost: no extra hardware and a one-minute measurement. The limitation is that it is a screening tool, not a diagnosis. A positive result has to be confirmed by ECG, and the rate of false alarms matters, as an independent trial published in 2026 showed (see below).

No head-to-head comparison with the Apple Watch backing that claim could be found in the published papers reviewed for this article.

What the EIC Grant Paid For

The European Commission's list of companies selected in the 8 January 2020 cut-off names Precordior Oy of Turku as the only company behind CARDIOSIGNAL, with grant-only funding. CORDIS records the grant agreement as signed on 11 May 2020, with the project running from 1 June 2020 to 31 August 2022 under the SME instrument phase 2 funding scheme. When Turku's business development agency announced the award on 2 April 2020, it described a 24-month project and said market entry for the new detection capabilities was planned for 2022. The project in the end ran 27 months.

The application set out an ambitious business case. At the time Precordior had a team of 13, €3 million of funding secured, 19 patents and an AFib app that was "complete, clinically proven". The project would build heart failure and coronary artery disease modules, obtain regulatory approval and launch in the EU, with the US and China to follow. By 2025, the objective said, 1.27 million at-risk patients and doctors would use the app daily, and the company would reach "€85M revenue, €38M EBITDA, 250 FTE".

The final periodic report on CORDIS, covering June 2021 to August 2022, reads as a work in progress. Algorithms for coronary artery disease and heart failure "have been under development"; clinical studies "have been prepared and in part carried out"; negotiations on go-to-market "have been ongoing". The listed deliverables are a dataset, a web and health-record portal codebase, a clinical study plan, a brand identity kit and project management reports. The report still says market entry "will take place in 2022". No approval of a heart failure or coronary module was reported, then or since.

1. Heart failure detection modulePartly deliveredValidated in a 2024 study in JACC: Heart Failure; the company still lists it as under study.
2. Coronary artery disease moduleNot deliveredSponsor study NCT04290091 completed in 2023 with 930 enrolled; no results posted or published.
3. Regulatory approval for the new modulesNot deliveredThe 2025 MDR certificate covers atrial fibrillation and heart rate only.
4. Market entry in 2022Not deliveredNo heart failure or coronary product has been launched.
5. Launch in the US and ChinaNot deliveredNo FDA 510(k) clearance found; no China launch announced.
6. €85M revenue and 250 staff by 2025Not delivered€1.74M revenue and 28 staff in 2025.
7. AFib app kept on the marketDeliveredClass IIb under MDR since June 2025, sold in 15 countries.

The Clinical Evidence Since the Grant

The strongest result is the heart failure study. In April 2024 JACC: Heart Failure published a multicentre study, with Blomster as senior author, of 217 participants with heart failure and 786 control subjects from Finland and the United States. Using commercially available smartphones, the algorithms reached an area under the curve of 0.95, with a sensitivity of 85%, a specificity of 90% and an accuracy of 89%. ScienceDaily reported that the study ran at Turku and Helsinki University Hospitals and Stanford University Hospital, and quoted Blomster saying primary care has "very limited tools for detecting heart failure". Neither source gives a date for a product.

The heart failure study was sponsored by the company: Precordior Ltd is listed as lead sponsor of the Finnish arm, NCT04444583, which completed in December 2024. The coronary artery disease study, NCT04290091, also sponsored by Precordior, started in January 2020, enrolled 930 people and completed on 31 December 2023. ClinicalTrials.gov shows no posted results, and a search of Europe PMC found no published paper reporting coronary artery disease detection with the CardioSignal method.

The AFib app itself faced an independent test. A randomised trial at Turku of 150 patients after invasive cardiac procedures, published in Scientific Reports on 3 February 2026, combined twice-daily CardioSignal recordings with a bed sensor. It found atrial fibrillation in 6 of 78 patients in the monitored group and none of 72 in the control group. But 33 of 68 monitored patients, 48.5%, had alarms that did not lead to a confirmed diagnosis, and the authors concluded the approach "in its present form, is not suitable for routine clinical implementation". The same trial is registered as NCT05351775, sponsored by the University of Turku.

Money, Customers and Partners

In January 2024 the company closed a $10 million Series A led by the US fund DigiTx Partners, with the Norwegian fund Sandwater and existing investor Maki.vc, bringing total funding to $23 million, according to tech.eu and AIN. Both reported 52 patents, a US subsidiary in Palo Alto, and the app's availability in 15 countries as a Class IIa device for AFib. The amount of the individual earlier rounds could not be verified from two sources. The company is not among the roughly 320 organisations on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all 16 pages; as a grant-only winner it received no EIC equity.

Revenue grew almost eightfold between 2021 and 2025 but remains small, and fell 30.6% in 2024 before recovering. Operating losses have stayed between €1.0 million and €1.6 million a year, according to Asiakastieto; Finder.fi gives net losses of €1,586,000 for 2021 and €1,151,000 for 2025. These are the Finnish parent company's figures; accounts of the US subsidiary are not public.

The commercial deals that are public are insurer pilots and clinic use. In June 2025 the Finnish insurer LocalTapiola began offering 5,000 customers aged 50 to 75 six months of free AFib screening with the app, the company announced, adding that more than 200,000 people in 15 countries had used the app; that user figure comes from the company alone. The Danish heart clinic Mølholm tells patients to use CardioSignal weekly after ablation to check for recurring AFib, according to its patient page. In November 2025 CardioSignal won the Desafío DKV 2025 challenge of the insurer DKV, chosen from 79 applications, with a €10,000 prize and a place in the ERGO ScaleHub programme, the company reported.

The regulatory step of the period was the move from the old Medical Device Directive to the Medical Device Regulation. CardioSignal was certified as a Class IIb device under MDR in June 2025 and shipped its first MDR app release in November 2025, alongside "CardioSignal Inside", a software kit that lets other companies embed its AFib detection in their own apps. No FDA clearance for the app appears in the FDA 510(k) database, which returns no match for Precordior or CardioSignal.

Other EU Projects

CORDIS lists Precordior in four further EU projects. It received €245,313.75 as a participant in the photonics packaging project APPLAUSE (May 2019 to October 2022) and €225,000 in the medical microfabrication project Moore4Medical (June 2020 to September 2023). It takes part without EU funding in the heart failure research project iCARE4CVD (October 2023 to March 2028) and as a partner in the arrhythmia training network INSIDE-HEART (November 2023 to October 2027).

Why It Matters for Europe

Cardiovascular disease kills 1.7 million people a year in the EU, and in December 2025 the European Commission adopted its first EU-wide plan for heart health, the Safe Hearts Plan, according to the Commission's health portal. The plan puts early detection and "digitally enabled" prevention at its centre, and the World Heart Federation notes its proposed EU protocol on health checks and its push for digital tools and AI in care. Cheap screening for atrial fibrillation and, in time, heart failure, on phones people already own, fits that agenda.

The Verdict

Precordior and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.