She trained at Miami and Duke, sharpened her craft at Medtronic, and learned to pick problems at Stanford Biodesign. Then she cofounded Selera Medical and made herself accountable for the answer.
The fastest way to understand Stacie Arechavala is to look at what she built before anyone was paying her to build it. A low-cost hearing test for infants in places without audiologists. An oxygen distribution system for a hospital in Uganda, designed with students at Makerere University. A 3D-printed prosthetic arm shaped to fit one specific kid. She was still a student, and already the pattern was set. The work pointed at the people who usually get new technology last, if at all.
Years later that pattern has a company attached to it. Arechavala is the cofounder and CEO of Selera Medical, a San Francisco startup in Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. The company is small - two founders, a big problem, and a device-based approach to heart failure care. But the instinct behind it is old. Find the gap that others walk past. Then make yourself the person responsible for closing it.
Arechavala studied biomedical engineering at the University of Miami, then went to Duke for a graduate engineering degree with a focus on biomechanics and engineering management. That is a long runway before starting anything. A lot of founders skip it. She did not.
The classroom years were not quiet. Her project list from that period reads like a tour of unglamorous, high-effort problems: an ultrasonic device to measure bone density in newborns, a wireless catheter connector, a heart-rate monitor built from raw signal processing, and SafeEye, a smart contact-lens case that she took to the Triangle Health Innovation Challenge. She was learning a specific thing that no lecture teaches - how to take an idea from a sketch to a thing that works in your hand.
Look at the toolset she picked up along the way and you get a sense of the range. CAD in SolidWorks, Inventor, and Fusion360. Simulation in COMSOL and Ansys. Circuit board work in Altium and Fritzing. Microcontroller builds on Arduino and Particle Photon. That is the full stack of a hardware person - mechanical, electrical, and computational all in one pair of hands. It is unusual, and it is exactly what lets one engineer take an idea end to end instead of handing it off at every seam.
After Duke she joined Medtronic as an R&D engineer working on cardiovascular devices. Medtronic is one of the largest medical device companies in the world, and that matters here for a simple reason: it is where you learn rigor. Regulated hardware does not forgive shortcuts. You learn to document, to test, to respect the distance between a clever prototype and something that can be trusted. She carried that discipline out the door with her.
The pivot point in her story is Stanford. From 2021 to 2022 she was an Innovation Fellow at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign, a program built around a deceptively simple idea: before you invent anything, go watch. Fellows spend months shadowing real clinical cases, sitting in on procedures, watching how care actually happens rather than how it is described in a brochure. The point is to earn the right to name a problem by seeing it up close, over and over.
That is where she met Kevin Bui, a bioengineer with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and an undergraduate degree from Stanford. The two of them shadowed cases across Bay Area hospitals. And they kept seeing the same thing - a category of patients cycling in and out of care with treatment options that had barely changed in decades. It was the kind of gap that is easy to note and hard to do anything about.
Watch real cases until a problem repeats itself so often that ignoring it feels irresponsible. Only then start engineering. Selera Medical did not begin on a whiteboard. It began on a hospital floor.
There is something quietly countercultural about that method in a startup world that prizes speed. The reflex everywhere else is to move first and learn later, to ship and iterate. Biodesign inverts it. You slow down at the front, you spend your patience on the diagnosis, and by the time you commit you know the problem better than almost anyone. Arechavala's whole career had been rehearsing for exactly this - watch closely, then build. The fellowship just gave the instinct a name and a cofounder.
Between the fellowship and founding, Arechavala also spent time close to the operating core of young companies, taking on chief-of-staff and advisory work at healthtech firms including Rad AI. It is a useful detour to notice. She was not only the engineer in the lab. She was learning how a company runs from the inside - hiring, priorities, the unglamorous machinery of turning an idea into an organization. When she eventually took the CEO title, none of that was theoretical.
Selera Medical came together in 2023. The split is clean: Arechavala runs the company as CEO, Bui runs the technology as CTO. Between them they have the two halves you need for a device company - someone who has lived inside the medical device industry and its operations, and someone who has spent years in a bioengineering lab. It is a small team by design. Small teams move.
The company's ambition is to change a treatment approach that has been stuck for a long time, using a minimally invasive, one-time device rather than an endless regimen. The specifics are the founders' to explain, and they are actively looking to connect with cardiologists and interventional radiologists to test and refine the work. What is worth saying here is the shape of the bet: a lot of people describe problems in medicine. Far fewer commit years of their lives to owning a solution, in a field where the feedback loops are slow and the standards are unforgiving.
Arechavala has described her Gallup StrengthsFinder top five, and it is a revealing little self-portrait: Command, Futuristic, Activator, Restorative, Significance. Read it next to her track record and it stops looking like a personality quiz and starts looking like a job description. Futuristic and Significance explain why she keeps reaching for problems that matter at scale. Command and Activator explain why she does not just describe them. Restorative is the engineer's instinct - see something broken, fix it.
Her self-reported Gallup top five, illustrated. Not a ranking of ability - a map of where her attention goes.
There is a creative streak running underneath all of this that is easy to miss. She has done graphic and logo design work, which is a small detail that quietly explains her motto. When she says design is what makes innovation happen, she is not being poetic. She means the discipline of shaping a thing so that a real person can actually use it. An engineer who also thinks like a designer tends to build products people reach for, not products people are impressed by.
Away from the lab she paints, she bakes, she runs, and she describes herself as drawn to adventure. It is the same set of restless hands, just aimed at different materials. There is a coherence to people like this. The person who wants to run a distance and the person who wants to build a device that reaches an underserved hospital are usually the same person - someone who is happiest when there is a hard thing in front of them and a reason to finish it.
What ties the whole story together is access. It shows up in the very first projects, the ones nobody assigned real stakes to, and it shows up now in the choice to work on care for a population that has been underserved by the pace of innovation. She could have stayed at a large device company with its resources and its rigor. She chose the harder, lonelier path of building from scratch, because that is where you get to decide which problem is worth your life for a while.
Do the homework before you found. Learn the domain, the tools, and the customer up close - then pick your problem by observation, not by brainstorm. The founders who spot a real gap are usually the ones who spent long enough somewhere to see it repeat.
Selera Medical is still early. The device still has to prove itself, the trials still have to happen, and the field it is entering has humbled plenty of smart people before. None of that is hidden. But if you are betting on who runs toward that kind of problem and stays, the resume argues for Arechavala. She has been building for the people at the edge of the system since before it was a career. Now it is the whole job.
It also says something about temperament. Building hardware for medicine is a test of patience more than genius. The wins are slow and the setbacks are quiet, and most of the work happens years before anyone outside the room notices. That suits a person whose portfolio was full of hard, unglamorous builds long before there was a company name on them. She was doing this when no one was watching. That is usually the tell.
The line she keeps coming back to is worth ending on, because it is not a slogan so much as a working method. Innovation can change the world; design will make it happen. She has spent a decade proving she believes the second half.