respiratory-health
(8)
Haleon
The company you have never heard of makes the toothpaste, painkillers and vitamins you buy without thinking. Here is how GSK's cast-off brands became a £30 billion bet on self-care.
SaNOtize Research and Development Corp.
SaNOtize Research and Development Corp. is a Vancouver-based pharmaceutical and medical-device company that harnesses nitric oxide (NO), a naturally occurring antimicrobial molecule, to prevent and treat viral, bacterial and fungal infections. Its patented Nitric Oxide Releasing Solution (NORS) platform powers a Nitric Oxide Nasal Spray (NONS) sold internationally under brands including Enovid, VirX and FabiSpray, along with a pipeline addressing COVID-19, respiratory viruses, sinusitis, wound infection and onychomycosis.
Apreo Health
Apreo Health is a clinical-stage medical device company in Menlo Park, California developing the BREATHE Airway Scaffold, a bronchoscopically delivered, self-expanding nitinol implant that relieves lung hyperinflation in patients with severe emphysema. Unlike existing valve and surgical treatments that collapse or remove lung tissue, the scaffold gently tents open damaged airways to release trapped air while sparing healthy tissue, aiming to expand who can be treated. The company raised a $130M Series B in August 2025 to run its pivotal BREATHE-3 trial and prepare for early commercialization.
Samay
Samay (formerly Respira Labs) is a San Francisco Bay Area medtech company building Sylvee, a wearable chest patch that pings the lungs with sound waves and uses AI to detect COPD and predict flare-ups before they turn dangerous. Founded by physician-inventor Dr. Maria Artunduaga, the company turns a $40 acoustic sensor into a continuous, at-home alternative to hospital pulmonary function tests, aiming to catch the invisible early signs of lung disease that standard tools miss.
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.
Christopher Skowronek
Christopher Skowronek is the Chief Executive Officer of NuvoAir Medical, a Boston-based, virtual-first specialty care company built around the people most healthcare leaves waiting: patients with complex heart and lung conditions. He climbed into the top job after running growth and business for the company, and after two decades shaping sales and operations strategy across payers, providers and care-management platforms like Lumeris and Bamboo Health. His operating creed, borrowed from NuvoAir's own motto, is blunt: no one left behind. In 2026 he steered the company through the sale of its clinical-trials arm to Strados Labs so NuvoAir could do one thing without distraction - deliver cardiopulmonary care to patients across the country.
resbiotic
resbiotic is a physician-founded microbiome health company building clinically tested probiotics, prebiotics, postbiotics, and bioactive botanicals around its Gut-X Axis platform - the idea that the gut talks to the rest of the body. Its flagship resB Lung Support is positioned as the first clinically tested probiotic targeting the gut-lung axis for respiratory health. Founded in 2020 by physician-scientist Dr. C. Vivek Lal out of microbiome research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the company sells direct-to-consumer and through retail including Walmart and GNC, and has raised roughly $20.6M to date.