Sedivention raises €2.9M for a one-time obesity treatment — no surgery, no drugs, no implants

Bariatric surgery works, but only a fraction of obese patients can access it. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic work, but patients must take them indefinitely — and stop if they can’t afford them. For the one billion people expected to be living with obesity by 2030, neither option is a real solution at scale.

Sedivention, a medtech startup based in Magdeburg and Munich, is building a third path: a one-time, outpatient procedure that takes 20 minutes, leaves nothing behind in the body, and targets the root cause of hunger rather than managing its symptoms.

The company has just closed a €2.9 million seed round led by bmp Ventures and the IBG funds, with participation from existing investor High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), superangels, Cambridge Ventures, and the strategic investment arm of an undisclosed global medtech company. The funding follows an €800,000 pre-seed from HTGF in November 2024.

The science: freeze the hunger signal, once

Obesity is not primarily a discipline problem. It is, in many cases, a physiological one — a dysfunction in the feedback loop between the stomach and the brain that regulates hunger and satiety. The vagus nerve is the highway for that signal: gastric branches of the nerve transmit hunger cues to the brain, and in obese patients, that system is chronically dysregulated.

Sedivention’s approach is to interrupt those signals permanently, using cold rather than a scalpel. Their Blizzard Catheter — a specially designed cryo balloon catheter — is inserted through the mouth in a procedure similar to a standard gastroscopy. Precise cryoablation targets and ablates the hunger-related gastric branches of the vagus nerve. The procedure takes approximately 20 minutes, requires no incisions, leaves no implants, and is performed on an outpatient basis.

The result, in principle: a lasting reduction in hunger sensation from a single intervention, without surgery, without ongoing medication, and without barriers to access that make existing treatments unscalable.

A second-generation prototype has already been successfully developed and validated for safety and efficacy by ETH Zurich and the CV Path Institute — an important credibility marker ahead of the First-in-Human Study the team is now preparing.

The founders: two physicians, 30+ years in medtech

Together, Bröcker and Nollert bring over 30 years of combined medtech experience. The company has been filing patents since 2019 and presented research at EASO 2025 — the European Congress on Obesity — establishing early credibility in the clinical community before seeking scale-up capital.

Why this matters now: the GLP-1 gap

The rise of GLP-1 drugs — semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy), tirzepatide (Mounjaro) — has transformed the obesity conversation. These drugs work, and demand has been extraordinary. But they come with significant limitations: patients must take them indefinitely, costs are high, supply has been constrained, and discontinuation leads to rapid weight regain. They are a management tool, not a cure.

Bariatric surgery remains the most effective long-term intervention for severe obesity, but it is highly invasive, carries meaningful surgical risk, requires significant recovery time, and is inaccessible to the vast majority of the 1 billion+ people who need treatment. According to the World Obesity Federation, obesity-related global healthcare costs are expected to reach up to $4 trillion annually.

Sedivention is positioning itself in the gap between these two extremes — more durable than a drug, far less invasive than surgery, and designed from the outset for outpatient delivery at scale. The global obesity treatment devices market stood at $15.9 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $60.5 billion by 2030, growing at 22.3% annually.

Investor perspective

“Sedivention combines medical evidence with a clearly scalable and cost-effective medtech approach. The team is addressing a globally relevant medical condition with a technologically compelling solution.”

— Dr. Jan Engels, Senior Investment Manager, HTGF

“When we look back in 10 years, Sedivention will be one of the companies that changed obesity treatment forever. Existing solutions manage — Sedivention solves.”

— Franzi Majer, Founding Partner, superangels

What the funding enables

The €2.9 million will fund three concrete milestones: completing product development of the Blizzard Catheter, conducting the First-in-Human Study, and preparing the next clinical and regulatory steps toward market entry. The strategic investor from the global medtech industry — whose identity is undisclosed — adds a commercial dimension beyond capital, potentially opening distribution pathways when the device is ready for market.

In the longer term, Sedivention’s ambition is to replace highly invasive surgical procedures with interventional outpatient alternatives — not just for obesity, but potentially for related conditions where vagus nerve modulation plays a role, including diabetes and hypertension.

Sedivention GmbH is based in Magdeburg and Munich, Germany. More information at sedivention.com.

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