Sepsis, an acute inflammation triggered by infection, is a leading cause of childhood mortality, claiming roughly 3 million children under the age of five annually.

Efferon, a startup selected as one of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026’s Startup Battlefield 200, is on a mission to drastically lower that number.

The company has developed a medical device that it says lowers organ failure rates and significantly accelerates recovery in children.

When standard treatments like antibiotics cannot stop the immune system’s overreaction, a patient’s blood must be filtered to remove deadly toxins. That is where Efferon’s devices, of absorbers of dangerous cytokines and toxins, step in to make a critical difference.

Dima Romashin, Efferon’s co-founder and CEO, compares what happens in the body during sepsis to a fire, where an immune response overwhelms the body rapidly. “In a fire, there are two things: the flame itself and smoke that it produces,” he told TechCrunch.

In sepsis, endotoxins are the flames and cytokines are the smoke. Efferon, unlike other devices on the market, has developed a mechanism that can absorb both at once, according to Romashin.

Although Efferon makes absorbers for adults, Efferon NEO, its pediatric device developed specifically for young kids, is proving especially effective. Since children have a significantly lower circulating blood volume, they require medical devices engineered specifically for their physiology, according to Romashin.

In April, Efferon NEO received a CE mark, Europe’s equivalent to FDA approval, making it the first multimodal blood purification device specifically engineered for pediatric sepsis.

Efferon NEO is used in intensive care units across 30 countries, including European hospitals, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand. The company is now preparing to file for FDA approval and is on track to hit $2 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2026.

The startup’s technology was originally developed by scientists at Moscow State University, including co-founder Ivan Bessonov. Recognizing its potential, Romashin, a serial entrepreneur, stepped in earlier this year as CEO to help commercialize it.

Although Romashin admits that Efferon isn’t growing at the breakneck pace of today’s AI startups, true success for the company is measured by something else entirely: every child who gets to go home.