Digestive health company FoodMarble has raised $2.6m (€2.1m) in seed funding to invest in its personal digestive tracker.

The funding round was led by Business Venture Partners with participation from SOSV, Breed Reply, Delta Partners, and Enterprise Ireland.

FoodMarble says it aims to help people around the world find the foods most compatible with their unique digestive system and claims to have built have built the world's first personal digestive tracker. 

It helps people who experience digestive discomfort track how they respond to different foods and overcome common but hard-to-treat digestive issues. The FoodMarble AIRE is a hand-held device and associated app that analyses the breath, based on techniques used in gastroenterology departments, and makes that technology available to everyone.

Chief executive Aonghus Shortt said: “Healthcare systems today are not suited to helping people with these common but incredibly challenging gut health issues. Digestive symptoms can be profoundly disruptive to normal life, and we’re seeking to end that. Our mission is to help people cut through the complexity and uncertainty to find ‘their foods’.

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“We’re just getting started. We want this to be a tool that every family can have in the home to monitor and manage their digestive health, so that they can live healthy and happy lives.”

According to Shortt, everyone’s digestion is unique and FoodMarble allows a person to measure how their body digests food in real time in order to identify possible trigger components for problems in different foods. 

BVP managing director Elliott Griffin added: “The strength of the FoodMarble team and mission immediately caught our eye. Irritable Bowel Syndrome and other digestive issues are a daily problem for millions of people around the world."

FoodMarble believes that the personal test device, providing real-time readings over a period of time, may be more helpful in planning acceptable diets than the hospital tests, which it says “may not always capture how the patient reacts to certain foods or food groups”.

The company is raising further funds through an equity crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs where members of the public can evaluate their offer and possibly invest. 

The device costs €169 and is available online direct from the company, with an option to add a further programme for €29 to test for fermenting carbohydrates.

Photo: Aonghus Shortt (centre) with colleagues Lisa Ruttledge and Peter Harte. (Pic: Conor McCabe)