Edinburgh-based health tech firm snap40 said it secured £2 million in funding in what is thought to be the largest ever seed round by a Scotland-based startup.

The company said the first tranche of the investment — led by Edinburgh-based investment firm Par Equity — closed at the end of September and will allow snap40 to grow its engineering and data science team, complete clinical trials and gain regulatory clearance to open up the EU market.

snap40 said it also plans to move quickly into the US market by opening an American office in 2017.

The company’s mission is to change healthcare by helping hospitals catch deteriorating health earlier using a “medical-grade vital signs monitoring wearable arm-band and accompanying analysis software platform.”

The startup is led by CEO and co-founder Christopher McCann, a former medical student at the University of Dundee who left in his third year to found the firm.

McCann started the company as a medical student working on hospital wards where patients were being monitored only on an intermittent basis.

He witnessed patients deteriorating due to late recognition of warning signs and decided to set up snap40 as a result.

Joined by co-founders David Bowie and Stewart Whiting, McCann left medical school to grow the company “with a mission to disrupt a market dominated by large, expensive bed-side monitors which anchor patients to beds.”

snap40 uses a single medical wearable device to continuously monitor patients from the upper arm “across more health indicators than any other single device on the market.”

The patient monitoring market is estimated to be worth over $35 billion.

McCann said: “This investment is based on the strength of our product and the progress of our amazing team.

“We are excited to work with Par Equity and the rest of our shareholders as we build snap40 into a dominant player in the global people-health monitoring market.

“We have a product that can save lives, while providing clinical and economic benefits to health services.”

Robert Higginson, Partner at Par Equity, said: “We are delighted to be supporting snap40, a business with an ambitious vision for the future.

“The team has already demonstrated the ability to deliver to its plan, which is why we are supporting the business from such an early stage.

“This is a global market with significant potential and we believe snap40 is the company to succeed.”