Sunrise and the EIC Accelerator: A Sleep Apnoea Cure That Went Quiet

Sunrise is one of Belgium's better-funded medtech companies, and on its own terms a success. Its three-gram chin sensor diagnoses sleep apnoea at home, it holds two clearances from the US Food and Drug Administration, and in September 2025 it raised $29 million to expand a sleep clinic that operates across the United States.

None of that is what the European Innovation Council paid for. In 2021 the EIC awarded Sunrise €1,939,875 to develop a treatment: a light, connected wearable that would keep the airway open with personalised muscle stimulation, an alternative to the pressure masks that many patients refuse to wear. The project closed at the end of 2024. The public record of that treatment device since then is close to empty.

What Sunrise Does Today

Sunrise sells sleep diagnosis in two layers. The first is the device: a small sensor stuck to the chin overnight that records the movements of the lower jaw, which the company's algorithms translate into breathing and sleep events. The second is care. In February 2024 Sunrise announced the acquisition of Dreem Health, a California sleep telemedicine clinic with insurance agreements including Aetna and UnitedHealthcare. Chief executive Laurent Martinot framed it as "moving past diagnosis, to reshape the entire patient experience".

The United States is now the centre of gravity. The September 2025 round was raised to expand Dreem Health, which MedCity News reported operates in 49 states, and in May 2026 the American Academy of Sleep Medicine reported FDA clearance for Sunrise Air, a rechargeable version that adds airflow, oxygen and snoring sensors to the jaw-movement signal. In Europe, trials are comparing the sensor with existing NHS diagnostic pathways, according to ClinicalTrials.gov.

The Technology: Reading Sleep From the Jaw

Obstructive sleep apnoea happens when the upper airway collapses during sleep, cutting off breathing until the brain briefly wakes the sleeper. The gold-standard test, polysomnography, means a night in a sleep laboratory wired to a dozen sensors. Sunrise's premise, traced to sleep specialist Jean-Benoît Martinot, is that the effort to breathe shows up in small movements of the jaw, so a single sensor on the chin can stand in for much of that equipment. Its first FDA authorisation came through the De Novo route, the pathway for devices with no existing equivalent.

The treatment the EIC funded would use the same insight in reverse. Instead of recording the muscles of the upper airway, the SUNRISE Tx wearable was to stimulate them, keeping the airway open without the nasal mask of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy. CORDIS quotes the problem it targeted: an "80% treatment gap" among sufferers who never get treated, and the at least 35% of diagnosed patients who stop wearing the mask.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project ran for 30 months, from 1 July 2022 to 31 December 2024, under the 2021 Open call. Its closing report on CORDIS says the team focused on "refining the design and enhancing patient comfort" and that clinical validation demonstrated "strong clinical value". It gives no number of patients, no study name, no prototype count and no regulatory step. A search of public trial registries turns up Sunrise studies of the diagnostic sensor, not of a treatment.

1. A wearable apnoea treatment, designed and refinedReportedCORDIS reports design iterations and comfort work; no public image, specification or name of a finished device.
2. Clinical validationNot public"Strong clinical value" is claimed without data; no treatment trial appears on ClinicalTrials.gov.
3. A route to patients (CE mark or FDA)Not seenBoth FDA clearances and the CE mark concern the diagnostic sensor, not a treatment.
4. A company able to fund the next stageDeliveredEquity of €40.7M at the end of 2025, after the $29M round.

The record does not show whether the treatment works. It shows that Sunrise's public story since 2021 has been built entirely on the product it already had, and that the EU's own record of what €1.94 million produced is three sentences of general description.

What Sunrise Has Achieved Since the Award

On the business it chose to pursue, the record is strong. Sunrise has taken a diagnostic invented in Belgium through two US authorisations, bought its own route to American patients and insurers, and raised capital from one of Europe's largest investment firms. The filed accounts show the commercial effect: gross margin, the closest public measure of sales in accounts that do not disclose turnover, went from negative in 2022 to €3.07 million in 2025.

The Money

The Belgian company's accounts, reported consistently by Companyweb and Staatsbladmonitor, show a loss-making but well-capitalised business. It lost €9.43 million over 2022 to 2025. Equity, meanwhile, went from €1.77 million to €40.68 million, with the Official Gazette recording capital changes in July 2024, August 2025 and November 2025.

Why Europe Should Care

Sleep apnoea is a large European health problem that the Sensa proposal put at about 49 million sufferers in the EU, most of them undiagnosed. A cheap, comfortable home test and a mask-free treatment would both address it, which is why EU programmes funded Sunrise twice: €50,000 in 2018 for diagnosis and €1.94 million in 2022 for treatment.

What Europe got in return is a familiar pattern. The Belgian company kept its headquarters in Namur, but its growth market, its clinic and its newest regulatory milestone are American. Mario Draghi's 2024 competitiveness report counted 40 of 147 European unicorns founded between 2008 and 2021 that had moved their headquarters abroad, mostly to the US, as Tech.eu summarised it. Sunrise has not moved, but its patients increasingly have.

The Verdict

Sunrise has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements, regulatory databases and EU project data, linked throughout.