Heart failure affects more than 56 million people worldwide, and is one of the most challenging medical conditions to treat. French medtech company CorWave is on a mission to transform cardiac care with wave membrane heart pumps designed to mimic a natural heartbeat. Their innovative technology aims to redefine heart failure care and give patients back their active lives.

CorWave joined the EIC Scaling Club in October 2024, as part of the Cardiovascular Therapies market group. Transitioning from decades of research to clinical application, CorWave recently achieved a world first by implanting its proprietary wave membrane heart pump in a patient.

A pump that beats like a real heart

CorWave’s technology traces back to 1996, when engineer Jean-Baptiste Drevet, who at the time worked at Arts et Métiers research institute, conceived of a new pump design: a flexible membrane, inspired by the undulating swimming motion of marine animals such as dolphins. Essentially, this kind of pump could move fluid without spinning it.

The idea challenged the field’s traditional approach. Since 1998, the standard of care for patients with advanced heart failure has been the rotary pump left ventricular assist device (LVAD) – a turbine that spins blood continuously at high speed. This means it generates significant shear stress on blood cells and cancels the heart’s natural pulsatile rhythm, contributing to various complications that have limited the use of these devices.

Drevet spent nearly a decade developing prototypes in his own Parisian apartment before he and his partner met Sofinnova Partners and the startup studio MD Start. Under their guidance, a cardiac pump project built around the undulating membrane was incubated, and CorWave was formally created in 2012.

A wave membrane inspired by nature

At the heart of every CorWave pump is the wave membrane: a biomimetic technology that has been refined over more than twenty years of research. Rather than using a spinning turbine, an electromagnetic actuator sends oscillations through a flexible polymer membrane. This propagates a wave across its surface to gently propel blood forward.

CorWave has adapted this core technology into two specialized products:

• CorWave LVAS, the company’s full-support heart pump, uses a discoidal membrane to drive blood radially toward a central orifice, delivering 5 to 6 liters per minute of full circulatory support.
• Nemo features a rectangular membrane driving blood axially, providing a minimally invasive, partial-support solution for patients not suited for a full LVAD.

Thanks to its low inertia, the membrane rapidly modulates its frequency to deliver pulsatile flow at ~60 beats per minute, mirroring a natural heart. And, crucially, blood moves across the membrane at under 2 meters per second, compared to 5 m/s in commercial rotary pumps, thus minimizing shear stress and cell damage.

The team driving CorWave forward

CorWave’s leadership pairs medtech experience with decades of specialised engineering. Jean-Baptiste Drevet himself continued working alongside CorWave’s engineers to design and manufacture its first prototypes before turning to other applications of his invention. He passed away in 2022, and his idea remains the company’s founding technology.

CEO Louis de Lillers has led the company since 2015, transforming it from a small R&D startup into a clinical-stage scaleup. Before CorWave, he worked at Ernst & Young, at the corporate finance boutique Clipperton Finance, and on the information technology investment team at Sofinnova Partners. CTO Andreas Fleischli brings close to 30 years of experience developing LVADs, including a leading role in engineering and scaling one of the most implanted LVADs worldwide to date.

Funding, scaling, and clinical milestones

Alongside the complex engineering involved, CorWave faced another challenge: funding deep-tech R&D prior to clinical deployment. The company moved from an early €3.3 million Series A in 2013 to a €15.5 million Series B in 2016. Corwave also built a 1,300 m² lab and pilot production facility near Paris in 2017 and secured its first US patent in 2018.

In 2021, CorWave raised €35 million in Series C financing. A second closing of the Series C round in 2023, raising €61 million, funded the inauguration of a state-of-the-art urban factory in Clichy. “From a research and development company, we are now an industrial company”, de Lillers said at the time.

In a major clinical milestone on May 28, 2025, a team at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, led by Dr. Paul Jansz, completed the world’s first implantation of the CorWave LVAS in a patient with advanced heart failure. “The results we’re seeing are very encouraging for the future”, said Professor Chris Hayward, the study’s principal investigator.

With over €80 million raised in equity and a team of around 100 employees, CorWave has established a strong financial and industrial foundation to expand the reach of its technology.

Partnering with the EIC

CorWave joined the EIC Scaling Club as part of the Cardiovascular Therapies group in October 2024. In fact, CorWave’s relationship with the European Innovation Council runs deeper than most: an EIC Accelerator grant in 2020 was followed in 2021 by the EIC Fund’s first-ever direct equity investment in a private company.

“The EIC Fund has played an instrumental role in CorWave's quest to improve the lives of advanced heart failure patients”, CEO Louis de Lillers said at the time.

As the company advances its human trials, the EIC network can help it expand its clinical and commercial reach.

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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