Swiss-based healthcare Novartis’s corporate venturing unit has helped US-based medical device company Sonitus Medical, raise $25m.
The series D round was led by venture firm Abingworth. Sonitus said all other current venture backers joined the round. Its website lists its investors as including Novartis Venture Funds, the CIA’s quasi-corporate venturing unit In-Q-Tel, and venture firms Aberdare Ventures, Arboretum Ventures and RWI Ventures.
The $5.5m Wolverine Venture Fund, managed by students at The Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the US-based University of Michigan Ross School of Business, has also reinvested in Sonitus, having first backed it in March 2011. A regulatory filing said Sonitus raised $22m at that C round following $13.5m in September 2008.
Sonitus’s Medical Hearing System is described as “a non-invasive and removable hearing solution that imperceptibly transmits sound via teeth”.