Cytovale is a San Francisco-based medical diagnostics company that built IntelliSep, an FDA-cleared blood test that helps emergency departments identify patients at risk of sepsis in about eight minutes. Instead of hunting for a pathogen, the test reads the immune response by measuring the biomechanical properties of white blood cells using microfluidic deformability cytometry, high-speed imaging and machine learning. Founded on academic research that began in 2007 and incorporated in 2013, the company is applying its rapid host-response platform to one of medicine's most time-sensitive and deadly conditions.
Inflammatix is a Sunnyvale, California molecular diagnostics company that reads the body's own immune response instead of hunting for the pathogen. Its FDA-cleared TriVerity test measures 29 host mRNAs from a blood sample and, using machine-learning algorithms, returns three scores in about 30 minutes: likelihood of bacterial infection, likelihood of viral infection, and overall illness severity. Run on the company's benchtop Myrna instrument, it is built for emergency and critical-care clinicians who need to decide fast whether a patient is heading toward sepsis. Spun out of Stanford in 2016, the company has raised more than $205M.
Tim Sweeney is the co-founder and CEO of Inflammatix, a Sunnyvale molecular diagnostics company that reads the immune system instead of hunting for pathogens. A surgeon-turned-entrepreneur with an MD/PhD from Duke and a biomedical informatics background from Stanford, he built TriVerity, an FDA-cleared rapid blood test that measures 29 immune-response genes and uses machine learning to score the likelihood of bacterial infection, viral infection, and severe illness. He has raised more than $200 million to bring precision medicine to sepsis and critical care.
Hal Paz (Harold L. Paz, M.D., M.S.) is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on digital healthcare innovation and AI-driven health solutions. A physician-scientist and seasoned health system CEO, he has led multi-billion-dollar enterprises at CVS Health/Aetna, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Penn State Health, and Stony Brook University Medicine. He has served as a medical school dean twice over - first at Robert Wood Johnson, then at Penn State - and has authored over 100 papers on sepsis, ARDS, and medical devices. Now at one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious venture firms, he bridges the worlds of clinical medicine and frontier technology, helping founders navigate the notoriously complex terrain of American healthcare.