The semester had every reason to end neatly. Denali Dahl was studying global health at Duke, taking a transcontinental engineering design course that paired students in Durham with biomedical engineering students at Makerere University in Kampala. The assignment was to identify a pressing problem and design something useful. There would be literature reviews, team calls, a presentation, perhaps a grade. Academia is quite good at endings. The problem her group chose was not.
The team focused on preeclampsia and the gap between what clinical care could detect and what many pregnant people could practically access. Dahl arrived with an engineer's habits. She had earned a degree in nanoengineering at UC San Diego, worked on DNA nanotechnology, and spent time in Robert Langer's laboratory at MIT studying a micronutrient-delivery system. She knew how to think about materials and mechanisms. Duke added a less visible tool: how to design a clinical study, plan an analysis, and ask questions that begin with the person using the device.
The project linked North Carolina, California, and Uganda through frequent three-way Skype calls. The distances were not decoration. They forced the group to consider whether a promising design would still make sense outside the environment in which it had been imagined. They read about urinary biomarkers. They sketched a home test. Then the class stopped, as classes do, and the team did something less customary. They continued.
“For me, this project is a dream come true.”Denali Dahl, 2017
01 · The useful detourAn engineer learns that a device is also a system
In 2017, the idea started collecting proof of a different kind. Dahl won first place and $2,500 in Duke's ChangeWorks competition. The team then won $10,000 as the global-health winner in UC Berkeley's Big Ideas contest and another $3,000 for second place at its Grand Pitch. A certificate photograph from Berkeley catches Dahl smiling beside mentor Richard Lowe, holding a check-sized placard for an idea that was still closer to possibility than product.
Prize money is flattering. It is also a demand for the next answer. The team needed to understand clinical cutoffs, prototype assembly, implementation, and who would use the test. Dahl's global-health training changed her relationship to the bench. She could build the engineering side, she said at the time, but learning clinical-study design taught her which questions to ask. This distinction is small enough to miss and large enough to make a company.
Engineering treats constraints as part of the design. Entrepreneurship adds unruly constraints: regulation, manufacturing, reimbursement, customer behavior, time, and money. Dahl did not pretend these belonged to someone else's department. The team pursued National Science Foundation Innovation Corps grants and interviewed doctors, mothers, doulas, midwives, and insurers in the United States, Uganda, and Nigeria. They worked with diagnostic specialists on materials and assembly. The strip had to perform, but the surrounding system had to make room for it.
Dahl did not chase the role of CEO. She accepted it as the structure the problem demanded.
02 · Becoming the vehicleThe business she had not planned to run
Dahl had not pictured herself running a business. Her career choices had pointed toward research: portable cervical-screening tools, drug-delivery systems, and technologies designed for settings where cost and access are not footnotes. But a startup offered a route to mentors, accelerators, partners, and capital. In 2018, she co-founded the company that became Kalia Health and took the chief executive role. Happy Ghosh, a fellow Duke global-health graduate, became co-founder and chief product officer.
The company was originally called MoyoMedical. Its name changed. Its underlying discipline did not. Kalia's product remained in development, and the team kept moving through the unphotogenic middle: refine the test, validate the biomarkers, protect the intellectual property, and assemble the right clinical and regulatory expertise. The grand narrative of innovation prefers launch day. Medical-device work prefers evidence.
“I'd never wanted to run a business, but it provided an avenue to most quickly translate an idea to impact.”Denali Dahl, 2020
That sentence explains the career better than a conventional founder biography. The company is not a departure from Dahl's research identity. It is an attempt to carry the research farther. She completed a biomedical engineering PhD through UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State in 2022, while continuing work on medical devices and drug-delivery platforms. Her publication record runs from portable colposcopy studies to 3D-printed devices. Her name also appears as an inventor on a patent application for preeclampsia diagnostic devices, systems, and methods.
03 · The bilingual founderOne company, two honest explanations
Dahl once described herself and Ghosh as bridging two worlds. In a business conversation, they explain market scope. In a global-health conversation, they explain impact. The trick is not to make one audience endure the vocabulary of the other. It is to keep both accounts true.
This is a useful founder skill because translation can quietly become distortion. A market story may sand off the slow work of clinical proof. An impact story may glide past the commercial machinery required to manufacture and distribute a device. Dahl's background gives her no excuse to ignore either side. She has trained in the laboratory, worked on clinical research, and sat through the pitch questions. The connective tissue is her job.
The company entered IndieBio's New York accelerator in 2022. That year it also received a $250,000 Social Justice Innovation Award sponsored by Morgan Stanley and the Centri Tech Foundation. In 2024, it opened a regulated crowdfunding campaign. Each event provided attention or capital, but none removed the central obligation to demonstrate that the technology works as intended.
A 2025 Grand Challenges grant pushed that obligation forward. Dahl is listed as principal investigator on work evaluating activin A and inhibin A as urinary biomarkers, with clinical studies in Stellenbosch and Bloemfontein, South Africa. It is fitting that a company born from a cross-border classroom now depends on cross-border clinical collaboration. The geography has changed. The operating idea has not: good design must survive contact with the place where it will be used.
04 · A taste for unfamiliar toolsElephants, chainsaws, and the permission to begin
There are biographical details that feel invented by an overenthusiastic screenwriter. Dahl trained as an elephant handler in Laos while still in high school. She has also dabbled in chainsaw art. Both facts sit oddly beside phrases like “biomarker validation” and “regulatory strategy,” which is precisely why they belong. They suggest a person willing to become a beginner in public, near objects considerably larger or louder than her credentials.
Co-founder Ghosh has described Kalia Health as the product of Dahl's drive to jump in and do things. That instinct alone can produce chaos. Dahl's career shows the more productive pairing: appetite for risk, followed by a respect for method. Take the course. Enter the competition. Learn the clinical language. Call the expert. Run the study. The jump matters; so does the landing plan.
In a 2025 founder interview, Dahl advised aspiring entrepreneurs that they do not need every answer at the beginning. The line avoids the usual mythology of founder certainty. Kalia's history is a catalogue of answers acquired after the beginning: from collaborators, interviewees, mentors, accelerators, journals, and clinical partners. Confidence, in this version, is not knowing. It is being willing to find out.
05 · The next gateTen years in, still asking the next question
By 2026, Dahl and Ghosh had joined the Chloe Capital NYC Founder Fellowship. Kalia Health completed the cohort's showcase and began launching a seed round. The founder's work now includes building a syndicate, meeting investors, and telling the story in rooms far removed from the original Duke classroom. Yet the recent grant places her back in the grammar of cohorts, samples, comparison assays, and diagnostic value.
This oscillation is the point. Dahl is an executive because she is an engineer trying to move an invention through the world. She is a researcher because the company cannot outrun its evidence. She is a fundraiser because evidence requires resources. The titles accumulate around a stable purpose.
Kalia Health's story is still being written in the difficult tense of “in development.” That phrase deserves more respect. It contains the experiments that fail, the assumptions corrected by interviews, the capital that arrives in installments, and the patience to treat a milestone as permission for the next test rather than a coronation.
The charming version of Dahl's story is that a class assignment became a company. The truer version is less magical and more useful. A class assignment revealed a problem. A group of people decided it deserved years. Dahl kept changing the shape of her work to match what the problem required. The semester ended. The learning did not.