copd
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Maria Artunduaga
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.
Charvi Shetty
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.
Victor Sadauskas
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.