Most medical devices live in a drawer. Charvi Shetty's lives in a backpack, and it talks back. Aluna, the company she co-founded and runs from San Francisco, makes a pocket-sized spirometer - the instrument that measures how much air your lungs can move and how fast. The clever part is not the sensor. It is what happens after you exhale: the reading streams to a phone, a game reacts to your breath, and the number lands in front of your doctor before your next appointment.
That is the whole idea. Take a test that normally requires a clinic, a technician, and an appointment, and turn it into a daily habit a child will actually keep. Aluna serves people managing asthma, COPD, and cystic fibrosis - conditions where a small dip in lung function today can predict an emergency next week, if anyone is watching. Shetty's bet is that someone always should be.
It is worth sitting with how unusual that bet is. The respiratory-care world has historically been built around the appointment: a patient feels fine, skips the check-in, and only resurfaces when their breathing has already collapsed into a crisis. By then the cheapest, gentlest interventions are off the table. Aluna inverts the sequence. Instead of waiting for the patient to come back to the data, it sends the data forward to the people who can act on it. A daily breath becomes a paper trail, and a paper trail becomes a warning system.
She frames it without drama. Patients and providers, she has said, should be able to "work more effectively together and prevent attacks before they happen." Prevention is the quiet revolution here. The hospital reacts. The backpack anticipates.
From brain scans to bronchial tubes
Shetty is a bioengineer by training - a bachelor's from UC Berkeley, then a master's in biomedical imaging from UCSF, finished with a thesis in 2013. Her early research had nothing to do with lungs. As a graduate student she analyzed diffusion-imaging data on patients with mild traumatic brain injury, mapping the brain's microstructural wiring. She was, in other words, already in the business of making invisible things measurable.
After UCSF she took a job at Genentech as an algorithm engineer working on metabolic drug efficiency. A good seat at a great company. She left it. The turn came during a graduate "Biodesign Capstone" project, where the assignment was to find an unmet clinical need and chase it. She interviewed her roommate, who had lived with severe childhood asthma, along with friends and respiratory therapists. The gap she kept hearing about was simple and maddening: outside the clinic walls, almost no one could reliably track how a patient was actually breathing.
Our growth will enable asthma, COPD and other chronic respiratory patients and their providers to work more effectively together and prevent attacks before they happen.
A hackathon, then a clearance
Aluna - originally named Knox Medical Diagnostics, a relic that still shows up in a few old "knoxmed" social handles - began as a project inside UC Berkeley's bioengineering program. The first prototypes came together the way a lot of good hardware does: at hackathons and in the campus CITRIS Invention Lab, soldering iron in hand, deadline approaching. She co-founded the company in 2014 alongside Inderjit "Indy" Jutla and Huyson Lam.
The detail that says the most about the team's instincts is the games. A spirometer only helps if people use it, and the hardest users to convince are children. So Aluna wired the device to video games that respond to a child's breath, turning a chore into play and a play session into a stream of clinical data. The fun is the feature.
It sounds like a gimmick until you understand the economics of adherence. A medical device that sits unused is worse than no device at all, because it generates the illusion of monitoring without the substance. Children, in particular, have no patience for instruments that feel like homework. By making the exhale the controller - the harder and steadier you blow, the better the game responds - Aluna solved a behavioral problem with a design choice rather than a lecture. The clinical value rides along for free on the entertainment.
The hard part was proving it to regulators. In April 2020, Aluna's smart spirometer earned FDA 510(k) clearance - the credential that moves a gadget into the category of trusted medical instrument. Along the way Shetty became the youngest recipient of an NSF Small Business Innovation Research grant, and is now recognized as one of the youngest female CEOs to bring an FDA-cleared healthtech device to market.
The found diagnosis
There is a quiet irony in the origin story. Shetty did not set out to build a company about her own lungs. But the work of designing a tool to detect poor lung function led, indirectly, to a personal realization about her own breathing - the kind of full-circle detail that tends to make a founder a little harder to talk out of the mission. The empathy was not borrowed. It was earned.
Scaling the exhale
By 2022, the model was working. Aluna's patient base grew roughly tenfold year over year, helped by the device's eligibility for insurance reimbursement under Remote Patient Monitoring - the billing category that finally pays clinicians to watch the data a home device collects. In January 2023 the company announced a $15.3 million Series B, led by returning investor Matrix Partners with participation from Rho Ignition and Dr. Warner Carr, an allergist and early adopter. The round pushed total funding to about $27 million and brought in a seasoned CFO, Alex Gurevich, whose resume runs through Credit Karma, Zendesk, and Google.
The Series B detail that matters most is who led it: Matrix Partners, a returning investor. When an existing backer doubles down, it is usually a signal that the numbers behind the scenes are better than the press release lets on. The participation of Dr. Warner Carr, a practicing allergist who was an early adopter before he was an investor, points in the same direction - the people closest to the patients were the ones writing checks.
The throughline across a decade is consistency of obsession. Brain wiring, drug efficiency, lung function - different organs, same instinct. Find the signal no one is capturing, then capture it, then make it impossible to ignore. Shetty has spent her career turning the body's quiet data into something a doctor can act on. With Aluna, the data finally fits in a pocket.
What is next is more of the same, pointed outward. The company that started by winning over pediatric asthma patients now reaches adults across the full range of chronic respiratory disease, the population for whom a missed warning sign is most expensive. The ambition is not a bigger device. It is a smaller gap between the moment a patient's breathing changes and the moment someone who can help finds out.
There is a particular kind of founder who is allergic to the abstract, and Shetty reads as one of them. Her resume could have pointed anywhere - imaging, pharma, pure software. She chose the version of the problem that ends with a kid breathing easier and a parent sleeping through the night. The metrics she talks about are clinical before they are commercial: attacks prevented, data captured, the distance closed between patient and provider. The funding and the growth are the byproducts, not the point.
That order of priorities is, in the end, the most reliable thing to know about her. Aluna grew up from a class project into an FDA-cleared platform with a CFO out of Credit Karma and Google, and through all of it the pitch never really changed. Make the invisible visible. Make the necessary fun. Then get out of the way and let the data do the warning. For a company built on the simple act of exhaling, that is a surprisingly hard thing to pull off - and a surprisingly hard one to argue with.