At 6:42 a.m. in a quiet bathroom in Ohio, a 64-year-old man with Type 2 diabetes brushes his teeth, looks at the small white slab beside the bathmat, and steps on. Ten seconds later, in San Bruno, California, his podiatrist receives a high-resolution photo of the bottom of his feet.
The slab is the Empo Footprint, an FDA-listed imaging scale that looks unremarkable on purpose. Underneath the matte plastic sits a camera array and a load cell, and behind that sits the Empo Remote Health Link - a HIPAA-compliant pipe that quietly couriers daily foot images and weight readings from a patient's home to a care team's dashboard.
The pitch is unromantic in the best way. Diabetic foot ulcers are the leading cause of non-traumatic amputation in the United States, and roughly 20 million Americans live with diabetic neuropathy that puts them at risk. The treatment guideline is daily foot checks. Almost nobody does them. Empo's bet is that habits beat heroics: if the screening is something you already do (step on a scale), the data follows by default.
A scale on the outside, a clinic on the inside. One step is all it asks.
Co-founder and CEO Anuj Khandelwal, a MIT and Stanford engineer who spent his early career at Amazon, built Empo Health in 2020 with co-founder Eric Dahlseng. The two had a thesis that consumer design - the kind that makes you stand on a scale every morning without thinking about it - could solve a chronic-disease compliance problem that no app, no patch, and no clinic appointment ever has.
It's a strange product to underestimate. The scale is cheerful, mint-branded, and modest. The numbers it stops are not. Diabetic foot ulcers consume up to $80 billion in US healthcare spending each year. The clinical pathway from an unnoticed callus to an amputation can run six to nine months. Catching the callus on day three is a different story.
All you have to do is briefly step on it once a day. — Empo Health, on the Footprint scale
Two things, working together quietly.
Empo Footprint
An imaging scale for the bathroom. Captures body weight and full-color, high-resolution images of both feet during a normal step-on. No buttons. No phone. No effort beyond the existing habit.
Empo Remote Health Link
A monitoring service that ferries images and weight data from the home to the care team. Flags concerning changes, schedules follow-ups, and gives clinicians a longitudinal record that an in-office visit can't match.
Three steps. One of them is literal.
Provider Prescribes
A podiatrist or endocrinologist enrolls a high-risk diabetic patient. The Footprint is shipped to the patient's home and set up next to the bathmat.
Patient Steps On
Each morning the patient stands on the scale for a few seconds. Weight is captured. So are full-color images of the soles of both feet.
Care Team Reviews
Images and weight trends flow through the Remote Health Link to clinicians. Concerning changes trigger an outreach before a callus becomes an ulcer.
Engineers with a bathroom problem.
Anuj Khandelwal
MIT undergrad, Stanford graduate, ex-Amazon. Built Empo around the conviction that consumer-grade design is the missing layer in chronic-disease hardware.
Eric Dahlseng
Technical co-founder. Co-incorporated Empo in 2020 and helped take the Footprint scale from prototype to FDA-listed device.
$15M raised, quietly.
Capital Raised (cumulative, USD)
What's happening.
- Jun 2025Empo Health raises a $7M round led by Story Ventures and commercially launches the Footprint + Remote Health Link system. Total capital raised reaches $15M.
- 2024-25Pilot study reports near-daily adherence and early ulcer signs detected in roughly half of enrolled patients - a striking number in a category defined by missed warnings.
- 2020Empo Health incorporated by Anuj Khandelwal and Eric Dahlseng. Bay Area based. Backed early by Ulu Ventures and federal SBIR grants.