The patch is smaller than a coaster and it is doing something a hospital used to need a room for. Stuck to a patient's chest, it emits a sound too quiet to notice, waits a fraction of a second, and listens for what comes back. The lung, it turns out, answers. Full or failing, inflamed or clear, it resonates differently - and Samay's software has learned to read the difference. This is the whole company in one gesture: not a scan, not a needle, just a question asked in sound and an answer worth hearing.
Samay - founded in 2018, once called Respira Labs - lives in Mountain View, California, and works on one of medicine's stubborn problems. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is the third leading cause of death worldwide. Yet the tools that measure it are occasional and expensive. A pulmonary function test happens in a clinic, maybe twice a year. A CT scanner costs roughly ninety thousand dollars. A flare-up, meanwhile, keeps its own schedule, and by the time a patient feels it, the damage is often underway.
The idea is old. The ears are new.
Doctors have tapped chests to hear disease for two centuries - percussion, they call it, a physician thumping a torso the way you knock a wall to find the stud. Samay did not invent the trick. It gave it a speaker, a microphone, and a neural network. The physics is called acoustic resonance: a lung behaves like a chamber, and the sound it returns shifts as air moves in and out, as passages narrow, as trouble gathers. Worn around the clock, the Sylvee device tracks lung volume, capacity, and airflow, then hands the raw signal to an AI trained to translate echoes into numbers a clinician can act on.
“The device listens to the lung the way a doctor taps a chest - only it never stops, and it never forgets.”
On how Sylvee works
The results have earned a second look from people paid to be skeptical. In clinical testing, Sylvee diagnosed COPD with roughly ninety percent accuracy. More striking, it flagged “air trapping” - a subtle early marker of impending exacerbations - at about eighty-three percent accuracy against the hospital gold standard. Air trapping is exactly the kind of whisper that standard tools miss until it becomes a shout. The work has been presented in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, the field's serious record of what is real.
Why a grandmother's name is on the device
The device is called Sylvee, after Sylvia, the founder's grandmother. She died following complications when a COPD exacerbation went undetected - the precise failure the company now exists to prevent. It is a hard fact to hold beside a pitch deck, and Samay does not try to. The name is the thesis. Build the thing that would have caught it in time.
That founder is Dr. Maria Artunduaga, a physician who trained as a surgeon before deciding the operating room was too far downstream of the problem. She studied public health at the University of Washington and at UC Berkeley, then taught herself the language of signal processing - with help from a husband who works in digital audio - and built a company around a single sense: hearing. It is an unusual resume. Most people scale the career they have. She rebuilt hers around one thing worth fixing.
“Sylvee is named for Sylvia, who died when her lungs went unheard. The company is the answer to that silence.”
The origin, in one line
Cheap on purpose
There is a reason the number keeps coming up: forty dollars. That is roughly the sensing hardware inside Sylvee, and the gap between that and a ninety-thousand-dollar scanner is not a rounding error - it is the entire strategy. Expensive machines get visited. Cheap wearables get worn. And the best sensor in respiratory medicine is not the most sensitive one in the building; it is the one still on the patient's chest at three in the morning, when the flare-up is quietly beginning.
Samay does not sell the vision as a gadget. It sells time. A continuous read means a warning can arrive before the emergency does - the difference, potentially, between a medication adjustment at home and an ambulance. In a health system slowly reorganizing itself around value-based care, where keeping people well is finally supposed to pay, a tool that measures lung health every hour instead of twice a year is not a luxury. It is the missing instrument.
Who is actually on the other end
It helps to name the customer, because Samay has more than one. There is the patient - someone living with COPD who currently learns their lungs are failing only in a clinic, and only occasionally. There is the pulmonologist and the health system, who would rather manage a chronic condition than pay for the emergency it becomes. And there is the pharmaceutical or device company running a trial, for whom a continuous, objective read of lung function is a better instrument than a patient's twice-yearly visit. Samay's business is arranged around all three: sell the data and the algorithms to partners now, build toward reimbursed remote monitoring for patients next. Revenue arrives through collaboration before it arrives through the drugstore.
That ordering is deliberate. Deep medtech is expensive and slow, and the graveyard is full of clever devices that ran out of money before they ran out of skeptics. By pairing grant funding with paid partnerships, Samay buys itself the rarest thing a hardware company can have: time to be right. The Chiesi deal is the clearest signal. A global pharmaceutical company does not lend its name to a seed-stage sensor for the optics; it does so because the small airway disease problem is real and the algorithms look like they might solve it.
The competition is the status quo
Ask who Samay competes with and the honest answer is not another wearable - it is inertia. The default is a spirometer in a clinic and a CT scanner down the hall, tools that are accurate, established, and almost never present at the moment a lung starts to fail. There are other digital respiratory players circling the same territory, from smart inhalers to bioacoustic sensing startups, and larger names like ResMed loom over the category. But the real incumbent is the appointment calendar. Samay's argument is that occasional and expensive lost to continuous and cheap the moment the technology could be trusted - and the clinical numbers are its case that it can.
Colombia before California
Here is a choice most startups would not make: Samay plans to launch in Latin America before the United States. It is not a regulatory shortcut. Artunduaga knows exactly which patients get failed first, and she has decided to reach them first. For a Latina-founded company - the first Latin American startup ever to win the MedTech Innovator accelerator, and a 2025 success story at the American Thoracic Society's Respiratory Innovation Summit - the direction is not a detour from the mission. It is the mission, pointed at the people who need it soonest.
The company has funded this the patient way. Of roughly $5.8 million raised, close to $2.9 million came non-dilutive, from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation - money you earn by proving the science is real, not by promising to grow fast. In an industry addicted to blitzscaling, Samay reads like an argument that hard problems can be financed by solving them. When pharmaceutical giant Chiesi signed on in 2025 to co-develop algorithms for small airway disease, it was a large company validating a small one, no equity required.
None of this happens without a particular kind of team. Samay is small, science-first, and unmistakably founder-shaped - a group fluent in three languages that rarely share a room: medicine, digital signal processing, and machine learning. The culture reads less like a growth-stage startup chasing a metric and more like a lab that decided to become a company because the lab was too slow. It is mission-driven in the literal sense: the mission came first, and the business was built to carry it.
What can a person actually do with all this? For a patient, the promise is undramatic and enormous at once: wear something you forget about, and let it notice the trouble you cannot feel yet. For a clinician, it is a lung read that arrives between visits instead of only during them. For a health system betting on value-based care, it is a way to turn a costly emergency into a cheap adjustment. The reported ~$15 million valuation is a footnote next to that - what matters is whether the patch keeps earning the trust the clinical numbers have started to build.
So return to the patch. It is still there on someone's chest, still asking its quiet question, still listening for the answer. What has changed is what happens next. The lung that once went unheard until it was too late now has something on the outside paying attention - continuously, affordably, and named for the woman it arrived too late to save. Samay did not make the lung speak. It built the thing that finally bothered to listen.
Figures - 90% COPD accuracy, 83% air-trapping detection, ~$5.8M raised, ~$15M reported valuation - are drawn from public reporting and company statements and are approximate. Some forward-looking plans (e.g., a Latin America launch) are targets, not guarantees.
