A Lisbon Startup's Contactless Bedside Lamp Draws €350,000 in EU Funding to Watch Over Epilepsy Through the Night
Lampsy Health, a Lisbon medtech spun out of the Instituto Superior Tecnico, has won €350,000 from the EU's European Innovation Council, taking its total funding towards €1M. Its contactless bedside lamp watches sleeping epilepsy patients for seizures; electronics and assembly are done in Portugal, a
A Portuguese medtech startup that began with a modified IKEA lamp in a garage has just won €350,000 from the European Union's innovation arm, pushing its total funding towards the €1 million mark. Lampsy Health's product is deceptively simple: a bedside lamp that watches a sleeping person for the tell-tale movements of an epileptic seizure — and does it without touching the body at all.
The grant comes from the pre-accelerator programme of the European Innovation Council (EIC), and it was hard-won: Lampsy was one of 70 startups — 11 of them Portuguese — selected from 1,083 applications across 22 countries. Earlier backing came from the Ageas Foundation and the State-linked fund Portugal Ventures.
The problem it targets
The company's pitch rests on a stark figure: it says roughly 86% of night-time seizures go unnoticed, precisely when no one is awake to see them. The lamp records the movements associated with a seizure and can capture video for a doctor to review afterwards, turning a night of unmonitored sleep into usable clinical data.
Lampsy is a spin-off from the doctoral work of chief executive Vicente Mayer Garção in biomedical engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST — the University of Lisbon's engineering school), developed with the EEG and sleep laboratory at Lisbon's Hospital de Santa Maria and with the Engage Design studio in Seixal. The device sells for €349 plus a monthly subscription, and the company already has a 5,000-strong waiting list — about half of it in the United Kingdom.
Made partly in Portugal
Unusually for a hardware startup, much of the manufacturing stays home: the electronics and the final assembly are done in Portugal, with only the external plastics produced in China. The next steps are a scaling round of around €500,000, plus the far harder climb of United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) certification and clinical trials, which would open the door to reimbursement by health systems such as Britain's NHS.
Why it matters
Portugal's deep-tech scene is long on promise and short on hardware success stories that actually ship. A home-grown medical device — conceived at Técnico, tested in a Lisbon hospital, assembled locally and now carrying EU money and a five-figure export waiting list — is exactly the kind of maturing that the country's innovation boosters have been waiting for. Whether Lampsy can clear the regulatory hurdles ahead will say a great deal about how far a Portuguese medtech idea can really travel.
