Hello Heart

The Smartphone That Learned to Act Like a Cardiologist

Open any major employer's benefits portal right now and you'll likely find Hello Heart sitting next to the dental plan and 401(k) enrollment form. That's not an accident. The Menlo Park-based company has quietly signed up more than 150 Fortune 500 companies, national health plans, and government organizations - making a case that a smartphone app paired with a Bluetooth blood pressure monitor can do what decades of annual physicals and doctor's appointments haven't quite managed: get people to actually care about their heart health before something goes wrong.

Founded in 2013, Hello Heart describes itself as the only digital therapeutics company focused exclusively on cardiovascular disease. That exclusivity is deliberate. While competitors in the digital health space cast wide nets across chronic conditions, Hello Heart built everything - the AI coaching engine, the connected hardware, the clinical studies, the enterprise sales team - around a single problem. Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, claiming roughly 700,000 lives each year. Hello Heart bet that nobody was building the right tool for it. Eleven years in, the evidence suggests they were right.

High Blood Pressure Has a PR Problem

Here is the uncomfortable truth about hypertension: most people who have it feel fine. There's no obvious pain, no visible symptom, no daily reminder that something is wrong. Doctors call it "the silent killer" because it does its damage slowly and invisibly - stiffening arteries, stressing the heart, increasing the risk of stroke and heart failure over years or decades.

The standard clinical response to this problem is a blood pressure cuff, a doctor's appointment twice a year, and a prescription for a medication that about half of patients don't take consistently. The system is not broken because clinicians don't care. It's broken because the feedback loop between the person and their health data is too slow, too impersonal, and too passive to change behavior.

Co-founders Maayan Cohen and Ziv Meltzer started with a deceptively simple insight: if people could see their blood pressure numbers in real time, understand what those numbers meant, and receive personalized coaching at the exact moment they needed it - they might actually change their habits. A doctor gets 15 minutes with a patient. A smartphone has the other 23 hours and 45 minutes.

Behavioral Science Meets Cardiac Care

CEO Maayan Cohen and co-founder Ziv Meltzer built Hello Heart in Israel before relocating headquarters to Menlo Park, California. The founding thesis borrowed heavily from behavioral science: people don't change health behaviors because of information alone. They change when the information arrives in context, when it feels personal, and when the feedback is immediate. Hello Heart's platform layers these principles into every user interaction - from the instant the app receives a blood pressure reading to the moment it decides what tip to send and when.

The company's early wager was that the employer benefits channel - not direct-to-consumer marketing - was the right distribution path. Health plans and large employers have a financial stake in whether their members and employees stay healthy. Hello Heart offered them a proposition with a clear ROI: pay a per-member subscription fee, and we'll show you the reduction in cardiovascular-related medical claims. The bet paid off. By the time the company raised its $70 million Series D in May 2022 led by Stripes, it had signed up dozens of major employers and was expanding rapidly into health plan and Medicare Advantage markets.

The leadership team around Cohen now includes a Chief Technology and Product Officer, a Chief Growth Officer, a Commercial President appointed in October 2024, and a VP of Medical Affairs who is a practicing cardiologist - a signal that Hello Heart takes its clinical credibility as seriously as its software.

More Than an App. Less Than a Doctor. Right Where It Needs to Be.

Hello Heart's platform has three hardware and software components that work together. A connected Bluetooth blood pressure monitor logs readings automatically to a paired smartphone app. A smart pill box tracks medication adherence. And the app itself - available on iOS and Android - pulls all of this together into a coaching experience that tracks blood pressure, pulse, cholesterol, weight, activity, and medication schedules in one view.

What the company is careful to emphasize is what the app does after it captures a reading: it explains it. Most people who check their blood pressure at a pharmacy or clinic get a number with no context. Hello Heart converts that number into a personalized explanation - what stage of hypertension it indicates, what the trend looks like over the past 90 days, and what specific behavior change might move it. The behavioral science engine underneath generates personalized tips timed to when users are most likely to act on them.

In August 2024, the company added symptom tracking. In October 2025, it launched Nia - a conversational AI health assistant designed to answer questions, explain readings, and act as a persistent, knowledgeable presence between doctor's visits. The move was described as the world's first AI heart health assistant.

What the Numbers Actually Say

Hello Heart is not short of data. The company has published peer-reviewed clinical outcomes in JAMA, the Journal of the American Heart Association, and Value in Health - the last being a health economics journal with a particular interest in whether interventions are worth what they cost. The short answer, according to those papers: yes.

The chart that keeps insurers on the phone: a 21 mmHg average drop in systolic BP equals a 40% reduction in heart failure risk. Actuaries noticed.

The JAMA study - covering 28,000+ participants over three years - is the one that gets cited in board decks. The finding that 84% of high-risk users reduced blood pressure is the headline. The mechanism is behavioral: more frequent monitoring, combined with personalized coaching, creates a feedback loop that clinical appointments alone cannot sustain.

The financial outcomes are equally pointed. A peer-reviewed study in Value in Health found average annual medical cost savings of $1,709 per enrolled user. For Medicare Advantage participants aged 65 and older, that figure rises to $4,014 per person per year. The City of Fort Worth, an employer customer, found that employees using Hello Heart had 29% lower medical costs compared to non-enrolled colleagues.

From Fortune 500 Boardrooms to Medicare Advantage Plans

Hello Heart's go-to-market strategy follows the money in healthcare. Employers pay enormous medical claims for cardiovascular-related conditions. Health plans carry the risk. Medicare Advantage organizations - private insurers administering Medicare benefits - compete intensely on clinical outcomes. All three constituencies have a financial incentive to invest in prevention. Hello Heart positioned itself as the measurable intervention that could justify that spend.

The company now serves more than 150 Fortune 500 companies and government organizations, including names like 3M, Lenovo, Northwestern Mutual, and the City of Fort Worth. In October 2024, Hello Heart expanded into government markets - state and local government employees, retirees, and their dependents. In August 2025, the North Carolina State Health Plan added Hello Heart as a benefit specifically for rural members, a population where cardiovascular disease rates are often elevated and access to specialists is limited.

The partnerships reflect the same strategy applied to clinical and distribution channels. The American Heart Association recognized Hello Heart as a member of its Innovators' Network. The American College of Cardiology announced a strategic collaboration with the company in 2024. Amwell integrated Hello Heart into its clinical programs portfolio on the Amwell Converge platform. Navitus - a pharmacy benefit manager - made Hello Heart available to its employer clients nationwide.

$148.5 Million and a Very Clear Thesis

Hello Heart's funding history is a clean progression from early-stage validation to growth-stage scale. The company attracted institutional investors who tend to back healthcare technology companies with demonstrated clinical outcomes and clear enterprise sales motion - Khosla Ventures, IVP (Insight Partners), and ultimately Stripes, a growth equity firm, which led the $70 million Series D in May 2022.

The Hands Holding the Heart

Go back to the image that opened this story: dozens of hands holding a large red heart, together. It's Hello Heart's own imagery, and it captures something real about the company's position. Cardiovascular disease is not a problem that any single actor - not a cardiologist, not an insurance company, not a mobile app - can solve alone. The value Hello Heart provides is in being the connective tissue between those actors: the employer who pays, the health plan that administers, the clinician who prescribes, and the patient who ultimately has to make choices every day that either protect or harm their heart.

The launch of Nia - the AI heart health assistant - in October 2025 is the most visible signal of where the company is heading. AI lets Hello Heart scale the behavioral coaching that has driven its clinical outcomes without scaling a human coaching team at the same rate. It also opens the door to more sophisticated, personalized interventions: detecting early warning patterns in blood pressure trends before they become emergencies, adjusting coaching approaches based on a member's actual adherence behavior, flagging individuals who need clinical escalation.

The health equity finding deserves a separate mention. In most digital health programs, clinical outcomes tend to skew toward wealthier, more educated, predominantly white user populations. Hello Heart's peer-reviewed data showed equal improvements across race, age, gender, and preferred language. That's a meaningful result in a field where health disparities are often baked into the product by default. Whether the company can sustain that finding at larger scale - and whether health plans buying the product will make it a formal requirement - will be worth watching.

Heart disease kills 700,000 Americans per year. It costs the U.S. healthcare system roughly $239 billion annually. Hello Heart is a $148.5-million-funded, 420-person company with a smartphone app and a Bluetooth blood pressure cuff. The gap between the problem's scale and the solution's current reach is still enormous. But the clinical evidence - published, peer-reviewed, validated by independent institutions - suggests that what Hello Heart has built works. The question is whether the healthcare system will move fast enough to let them deploy it broadly. CFOs and actuaries, at least, are starting to pay attention.