Company Profile · San Francisco
Aluna.
Hospital-grade lung function, minus the hospital. A breath a day that doctors can actually see.
THE ENTIRE LUNG LAB - PALM-SIZED, BLUETOOTH, AND WAITING FOR YOUR NEXT EXHALE.
Hospital-grade lung function, minus the hospital. A breath a day that doctors can actually see.
It is 7 a.m. somewhere in California. A nine-year-old with asthma blows into a small white device before school. The number lands on a phone, then on a pulmonologist's dashboard a hundred miles away. No clinic visit. No waiting room. No guessing. That quiet exhale is the whole company in one breath.
Aluna - born as Knox Medical Diagnostics, still wearing the old "knoxmed" handles in a few corners of the internet - makes an FDA-cleared spirometer the size of a deck of cards, plus the app and clinician dashboard that turn it into a daily habit. The premise is almost annoyingly simple: lung disease is invisible until it isn't, so make it visible every single day.
In May 2025 the company was acquired by Huma. The mission didn't change so much as get a bigger building to live in.
Here is the inconvenient truth about chronic respiratory disease: it is managed in snapshots. A patient sees a specialist, breathes into a machine for ninety seconds, and then disappears back into ordinary life for months. The disease, rude as ever, does not wait for the next appointment.
Spirometry - the gold standard for measuring lung function - lived almost entirely inside hospitals and clinics. Big machine, trained technician, scheduled slot. For the roughly 25 million Americans with asthma, that meant the most important number about their own airways was one they almost never got to see.
The gap between visits is where attacks are born. Aluna was built to live inside that gap.
Charvi Shetty studied bioengineering at UC Berkeley, then biomedical imaging at UCSF. Doing research, she kept bumping into the same wall: there was no good way to track airway obstruction outside a hospital. Most people would file that under "someone should fix this." She decided to be the someone.
She teamed up with two fellow Berkeley alumni - Inderjit Jutla and Huyson Lam - and bet that a clinical-grade spirometer could be shrunk, cheapened, and made friendly enough to use at the kitchen table. The medical establishment is, let's say, not famous for falling in love with that kind of optimism. The trio built it anyway.
Berkeley bioengineer, UCSF biomedical imaging. Spotted the at-home spirometry gap and built the company around closing it.
Met the team at UC Berkeley. Helped turn a research insight into a shippable medical device.
Part of the founding Berkeley trio behind Knox Medical Diagnostics, later Aluna.
The hardware is the easy part to admire: a portable spirometer with hospital-grade accuracy that pairs over Bluetooth, charges by USB, and wipes clean thanks to a removable mouthpiece. The harder, smarter part is the software wrapped around it.
Most medical devices assume you'll comply because you should. Aluna assumes you won't - unless using it feels good. So the app gamifies the daily blow: streaks, challenges, rewards. A device is only as accurate as the number of times someone bothers to use it, and Aluna's quiet genius is engineering for the bother.
FDA-cleared, palm-sized, hospital-grade. Bluetooth to your phone, USB charging, washable mouthpiece.
Auto-tracks FEV1% over time plus symptoms, medication, exercise and environment - wrapped in games and rewards.
Lets doctors watch FEV1 trends in real time, turning daily breaths into early-warning remote monitoring.
Conviction is cheap; traction is not. By its 2023 Series B, Aluna had pulled in roughly $27 million in total funding and grown its patient base about tenfold in a year. That round was led by Matrix Partners, with Rho Ignition and physician investor Dr. Warner Carr along for the ride.
Strip away the funding rounds and the FDA paperwork and Aluna is selling one thing: foresight. The point of a daily FEV1 reading is not the reading - it's the chance to act on a downward trend days before it becomes an emergency-room story.
That is also why the Huma acquisition fits. Folded into a larger remote-monitoring platform, Aluna's solutions are being relaunched on the Huma Cloud Platform and pushed toward FDA Class II - more clinical weight behind the same stubborn idea the Berkeley trio started with.
Return to the nine-year-old in California. Before Aluna, that kid's lungs were a mystery managed in retrospect - measured only after something went wrong. Now the morning exhale is a data point, the data point is a trend, and the trend is a warning the doctor can answer while there's still time.
Aluna didn't cure asthma. It did something quieter and arguably harder: it moved the most important number about your airways out of the hospital and into your hand, every day, where it belongs. The waiting room got a little less crowded. The calendar got a little less dangerous.
One breath, tracked. That was always the whole point.