Ascensia Diabetes Care led a $36M Series B in Sava on 9 October 2026 and took exclusive rights to sell the company's glucose sensor in Europe if and when a regulator approves it. Sava designs a skin-worn sensor that reads glucose continuously and streams the numbers to a phone. Renato Circi and Rafaël Michali founded the company in London in 2019, after training together as biomedical engineers at Imperial College London.
Balderton Capital, Pentland Ventures, Norrsken VC, Simplyhealth Ventures and JamJar Investments joined the round, which Ascensia announced from Basel, Switzerland, alongside the distribution agreement. Sava has now raised $68M including grants from Innovate UK and the European Union's Horizon programme, no valuation was disclosed, and Ascensia has not said how much of the $36M came from it.
Shallower, Not Needle-Free
Sava's sensor breaks the skin. It reads glucose in interstitial fluid, the watery fluid sitting between cells just below the surface, which is the same place Dexcom and Abbott read it. The company describes its sensor as about a tenth the length of the filament inside a conventional monitor, and it has published no measurement in millimetres.
Sava calls the device minimally invasive, and so does Ascensia's announcement. Nothing in the device is optical, radio-based or worn on the wrist, which places it outside the long line of attempts to read glucose through unbroken skin.
Replacing the fingerstick, in this field, means winning regulatory permission for a patient to dose insulin on the sensor reading alone, without pricking a finger to confirm it first. Dexcom and Abbott already hold that permission for their current monitors, so Sava is chasing the same permission with a sensor it says performs better, rather than opening a new category.
One Study, No Absolute Figure
Sava reported results in February 2026 from 46 people with type 1 or insulin-dependent type 2 diabetes at sites in Oxford and Cambridge, each wearing a Sava sensor and a commercial monitor at once, both checked against a laboratory blood test. The company put the gap between the two at about 0.8 percentage points on mean absolute relative difference, the standard measure of how far a sensor strays from a laboratory result. Accuracy drifted about 1.5 percentage points across ten days of wear.
Sava has never published its own mean absolute relative difference, and it did not name the monitor it tested against, so the 0.8 point gap has no published baseline. Dexcom publishes 8% for its G7 15 Day sensor, and Abbott publishes 7.9% for FreeStyle Libre 3.
No peer-reviewed paper or conference abstract covering that study appears in the public record, and no trial registration matching it is publicly discoverable. The only registration under Sava's name covers a separate 20-person study of 15-day wear, listed as not yet enrolling. An earlier announcement in July 2025 described the same programme as 50 patients with early results from the first 25, a count the company has not reconciled with the 46 it later reported.
Sava's own website calls the device experimental and says its performance is not fully characterised. Neither the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency nor the US Food and Drug Administration has approved it. The company says a pivotal study, meaning the large final trial that supports a regulatory submission, is planned, and that it is targeting European approval and launch inside 18 to 24 months.
Ascensia Left This Market In January
Ascensia sells the Contour blood glucose meters in more than 90 countries and belongs to PHC Holdings of Japan, which reported group sales of JPY 364.4B in its 2025 financial year. Peter Bodlund became chief executive in February 2026.
Ascensia held worldwide rights to Senseonics' implanted Eversense sensor from 2020, and the two signed an agreement in September 2025 handing commercialisation back to Senseonics. US sales reverted on 1 January 2026, and Ascensia's own continuous monitoring president moved across to Senseonics the same day.
The Sava deal puts Ascensia back into continuous monitoring through an unapproved product rather than a marketed one. Its announcement names only the Contour line and makes no mention of Eversense. Bodlund said microsensors "have the potential to transform the day-to-day monitoring experience for people with diabetes".
"For decades, continuous monitoring has been held back by the same legacy technology," Circi said of the partnership. "This is about to change." Michali called it "the first step towards bringing that technology to the millions of people who need it".
The Record On Reading Through Skin
Companies that tried to read glucose without breaking skin at all form a long list, and Sava is not among them. Cygnus won American approval in March 2001 for the GlucoWatch, which pulled glucose through intact skin using a small electric current. Reporting on the device recorded single readings straying by more than 30% and skin irritation in around 80% of users, and Animas, which had acquired the product, discontinued it in July 2007.
Google's life sciences arm paused its glucose-sensing contact lens in November 2018, saying it had found insufficient consistency between glucose in tears and glucose in blood. Rockley Photonics, whose largest customer for its infrared sensing work was Apple, filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2023 and restructured.
Apple's own effort has run more than 15 years without a product. Know Labs, which uses radio waves, reported 11.1% on the standard accuracy measure in March 2024.
The FDA told people in February 2024 not to use smartwatches or smart rings to measure blood glucose. It had authorised no such device, the agency said, and those products do not test blood directly.
Ali Yetisen, a professor of chemical engineering at Imperial College London, called non-invasive glucose monitoring "the holy grail of the entire self-diagnostics field" in a 2022 feature on the subject. Across more than 50 years of effort, he said, "all the attempts so far have failed."
John Smith retired as chief scientific officer of Johnson & Johnson's LifeScan division and has written a book on the search. He told the same feature in Optics & Photonics News that he does not see anything "that shows any greater promise than I saw 40 years ago".
Approval Comes Before Any Of It
Grand View Research sized the continuous glucose monitoring market at $13.4B in 2025 and expects $41.4B by 2033. Dexcom reported revenue of $4.66B for 2025, Abbott's diabetes care division reported $8B across all its products, and the International Diabetes Federation counts 589M adults living with diabetes in the eleventh edition of its atlas.
Sava has one distribution partner, one study whose full results remain unpublished, no absolute accuracy figure in the public domain and no approval in any jurisdiction. Ascensia holds European rights to a product that is not yet on sale anywhere, and the pivotal study those rights depend on has not begun.
