Maria Artunduaga is a Colombian-born physician-scientist, inventor and founder and CEO of Samay (formerly Respira Labs), a Mountain View medtech startup building a wearable plus AI platform that uses patented acoustic resonance to monitor lung function at home. She walked away from a plastic surgery residency at the University of Chicago after losing her grandmother Sylvia, taught herself engineering, and turned a kitchen-table idea into a company that has won the world's most competitive medtech accelerator and landed her on Inc.'s 2025 Female Founders list. She holds an MD, an MPH and an MTM, has collected dozens of prizes, six issued patents, and publications in Nature, NEJM and PNAS.
Theravance Biopharma is a South San Francisco biopharmaceutical company built around a focused respiratory franchise. Its flagship product, YUPELRI (revefenacin), is the first and only once-daily nebulized long-acting muscarinic antagonist approved in the U.S. for COPD maintenance, commercialized with partner Viatris. Spun out of Innoviva in 2014 and trading on Nasdaq as TBPH, the company combines a profitable marketed product with high-value royalty assets - including a now-monetized stake in GSK's TRELEGY - and runs a lean, capital-disciplined model rather than chasing scale.
Aluna is a San Francisco digital health company that turns daily breathing into data. Its FDA-cleared, palm-sized spirometer pairs with a gamified app and a clinician dashboard so people with asthma, COPD and cystic fibrosis - and their doctors - can track lung function (FEV1) at home and catch trouble before it becomes an emergency. Founded by three UC Berkeley alumni and originally named Knox Medical Diagnostics, Aluna raised about $27M total, including a $15.3M Series B in 2023, and was acquired by Huma in May 2025.
Cadence is a New York-based clinical technology company that helps health systems deliver continuous, proactive care to patients with chronic conditions at home. It pairs FDA-cleared connected devices that track vitals with an AI-powered care platform and a 24/7 clinical team, so doctors can catch problems - rising blood pressure, fluid buildup, glucose swings - before they become emergencies. Cadence partners with more than 20 leading U.S. health systems and supports tens of thousands of patients across dozens of states, targeting chronic diseases such as heart failure, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and COPD.
Carda Health is a New York-based virtual care company that delivers clinically supervised cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation into patients' homes. Patients receive a connected care kit and are matched with a clinical exercise physiologist who monitors their vital signs live during sessions. The company exists to fix a brutal gap in heart and lung care: roughly 90% of eligible patients never complete traditional in-person rehab because of transportation, scheduling, and mobility barriers. Carda now treats tens of thousands of patients a year and works with major health plans and health systems.
Charvi Shetty is the co-founder and CEO of Aluna, a San Francisco respiratory-health company that makes an FDA-cleared, pocket-sized spirometer paired with games and AI so patients can track lung function from home and send the data to their doctors. A UC Berkeley bioengineer with a UCSF master's in biomedical imaging, she left an algorithm-engineering job at Genentech to build the device, became the youngest recipient of an NSF SBIR grant, and is recognized as one of the youngest female CEOs to bring an FDA-cleared healthtech device to market. In 2023 Aluna raised a $15.3M Series B, bringing total funding to about $27M.
NuvoAir Medical is a virtual-first cardiopulmonary care company that helps patients with chronic heart and lung conditions - COPD, asthma, and CHF - manage their health from home before they end up in a hospital. Founded in Stockholm in 2015-2016 by Lorenzo Consoli and now headquartered in Boston, NuvoAir pairs FDA-cleared connected devices like the Air Next home spirometer with a clinical care team and data-driven monitoring. Its model is built around value-based care, with studies showing meaningful reductions in medical spend and hospitalizations. The company also powers decentralized clinical trials for pharma partners.
Victor Sadauskas is an emergency medicine physician turned entrepreneur and the Co-founder and CEO of Kivo Health, a San Francisco-based digital health company delivering AI-powered virtual pulmonary rehabilitation to COPD patients at home. A Y Combinator W23 alum, Sadauskas built Kivo from his firsthand clinical observation that only 3% of eligible COPD patients ever access pulmonary rehab - a gap he set out to close with a Medicare-covered, home-based program combining remote monitoring, respiratory therapy, and AI-driven coaching.