The least glamorous room in the house has become Hannah McKenney-Klepcha’s most interesting design brief. The bathroom is private, repetitive and spectacularly resistant to reinvention. It is also where Starling Medical, the Houston company she leads, hopes to make sophisticated measurement feel like no extra work at all.
That last part matters. Consumer technology is very good at assigning homework. Charge the wearable. Open the app. Remember the test. Enter the meal. Perform the ritual, then hope the chart produces wisdom. McKenney-Klepcha’s product philosophy runs in the opposite direction: begin with a routine people already perform and ask how engineering might quietly join it.
Starling’s system uses a compact optical instrument mounted inside a toilet to examine samples during ordinary use. The device is paired with software and a connection to clinical care. The exact product has changed over the company’s life, as young medical devices tend to do. The durable idea is passive participation - gathering a record over time without asking a person to become a part-time lab technician.
My experience within both the hospital and industry setting has developed my interest in emphasising the user-centered and human factors design of medical technologies.Hannah McKenney-Klepcha, on her design approach
An engineer before an executive
McKenney-Klepcha’s route to the chief executive’s chair was built from objects, not org charts. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a biomedical engineering degree, she worked with the Helping Hand Project on prosthetic hands for children. The materials were practical and immediate: SolidWorks, laser cutting, 3D printing. She later became a design consultant to other student groups, an early rehearsal for the founder’s peculiar job of helping specialists make a shared thing.
Her undergraduate years also included biomechanics research and an industrial-design internship at Better Future Factory, where she worked on a color-sensing device intended for settings with limited resources. She graduated magna cum laude in 2018 after six consecutive semesters on the dean’s list. By then, her interests had settled around a difficult intersection: complicated technology, real bodies and the messy conditions in which products are actually used.
Device-company placements at Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson added industrial discipline. At Rice University, she entered a master’s program in bioengineering that linked engineers with clinicians in the Texas Medical Center. There she met fellow students Drew Hendricks and Sylvie Kalikoff. Clinical collaborators brought the group a persistent, poorly served problem. The students began investigating. A class project acquired the dangerous habit of continuing after class ended.
Protect the problem, not the prototype
The first Starling concept was not the object now featured at trade shows. The early team worked on a catheter-based device intended to simplify a daily clinical routine. It won the Texas A&M New Ventures Competition in 2019, giving the group validation and a little oxygen. Yet the company eventually moved toward sensing technology that could live in a toilet.
Founders enjoy calling this a pivot, a word that makes years of uncertainty sound like a neat quarter-turn. In practice, it meant changing the hardware, user workflow and commercial path. McKenney-Klepcha and the team kept faith with the larger problem - easier monitoring and earlier connection to care - while letting go of their first answer.
It is a revealing choice. A product that depends on repeated use cannot treat inconvenience as decoration around the real technology. Inconvenience is the technology’s rival. Every recharge, reminder and manual sample is another chance for the record to develop a hole. Starling’s bet is that the bathroom can become an interface precisely because it does not feel like one.
McKenney-Klepcha had seen the same law from other angles. At MD Anderson Cancer Center, she established and managed a surgical innovation program that helped physicians move ideas through problem definition, prototypes, testing and clinical implementation. The work demanded translation: surgeon to engineer, observation to specification, invention to something that could survive rules, budgets and real users.
During the early pandemic, she joined a Rice and MD Anderson research effort on an elastomeric harness for ordinary surgical masks. The team tested designs on mannequin heads, then McKenney-Klepcha and co-first author Jeannette Ingabire recruited more than three dozen essential workers for comfort and airflow tests. Their peer-reviewed study appeared in JAMA Network Open in 2022. The project’s logic was admirably unromantic: use a simple addition to help familiar equipment fit better, then measure whether it works.
The technical ambition is high. The behavioral demand is deliberately low.
The company learns to speak CEO
Engineering explains how McKenney-Klepcha entered the story. It does not explain the full job she has now. Medical-device founders must learn several languages at once: regulation, reimbursement, manufacturing, clinical evidence, fundraising and the anxious arithmetic of payroll. Starling joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch, a sharp change of scenery for a company born in hospital conversations and university labs.
The company accumulated the public milestones by which an early venture marks time. It won the judged AARP AgeTech Collaborative startup event at HLTH in 2023. It joined the MedTech Innovator cohort in 2025. That year, Starling was named a Rising Star in home health diagnostics and monitoring by the Digital Health Awards. It appeared on a Nasdaq screen in Times Square through the MedTech Innovator program, prompting McKenney-Klepcha to make a dry public promise: next time, she wanted the company on the exchange. “We’ve still got a bit of work to do before that bell rings,” she added.
Project to company, in five moves
Awards do not finish a device. A bright screen in Times Square does not manufacture one, prove one or persuade a payer. McKenney-Klepcha’s joke works because she knows the difference. Starling has had to build a team around optics, data science, product engineering, manufacturing and clinical work. The organization listed 17 employees in the supplied company record, small enough that a CEO’s calendar can still ricochet between a study, a partnership and a product detail before lunch.
The founder’s transferable trick
There is an obvious temptation to treat Starling as a story about a clever sensor. The more useful story is about where McKenney-Klepcha chooses to place effort. She is reducing the burden at the edge - the moment when a person must decide whether to use the product - and absorbing complexity inside the system instead.
That is a principle builders can steal. Find a behavior that already happens. Observe it without romance. Preserve the user’s attention. Make the hard machinery serve the ordinary moment. The approach can look modest because the visible action is small. Behind it sits the difficult work of miniaturization, testing, privacy, software and clinical integration.
Her career contains several versions of this instinct: a child’s prosthetic assembled with accessible fabrication tools; a low-cost feeding project developed with collaborators in Costa Rica and Houston; a silicone harness improving an available mask; a diagnostic instrument designed around plumbing already installed in the home. Each begins with constraints rather than pretending them away.
McKenney-Klepcha has written that seeing engineers and scientists meet people affected by the problems they work on reconnects technical labor to its emotional consequence. It is a telling management note. A startup can turn a human difficulty into tickets, tolerances and test reports with alarming speed. The founder’s job includes restoring the reason those documents exist.
In January 2026, Starling returned to CES and demonstrated a mini spectrophotometer positioned at the front of a toilet bowl. The scene captured the company’s odd charm: serious instrumentation in a booth about a room polite conversation tends to avoid. McKenney-Klepcha stood comfortably in the contradiction. The bathroom is not glamorous. It is simply where the user is.
Whether Starling’s commercial wager succeeds will depend on evidence, execution and all the stubborn details that separate a compelling demonstration from durable infrastructure. McKenney-Klepcha’s record suggests she is at home in those details. She began as the engineer who asked how an object fit a person. Now she is building an organization around the same question.
The broader ambition is easy to state and hard to earn: make useful measurement routine, and routine measurement useful. If Starling works as intended, the technology will be remarkable partly for how little ceremony it demands. A person will enter a familiar room, do what they came to do and leave. Somewhere in that ordinary minute, the machine will have paid attention.