A soft sticker, worn on the skin, that reads your blood pressure beat by beat - no cuff, no needle.
Somewhere in a hospital right now, a patient is asleep on a table and a thin line runs into an artery in their wrist. It is the gold standard for watching blood pressure during surgery - accurate, continuous, and quietly dangerous. It requires a needle threaded into a vessel, a skilled hand, and a tolerance for the small risks that come with puncturing an artery. For everyone else in the building - the patients on the ward, the sleeper with apnea, the person whose pressure only gets checked once a year at the doctor - the truth arrives as a single snapshot from a squeezing cuff, and then vanishes.
Vena Vitals looked at that gap and asked an almost impertinent question: what if you could get the arterial line's honesty without the artery? Their answer is not a machine you wheel into a room. It is a bandage-sized sensor you stick on the skin.
This is a massive unmet need in healthcare.Ray Liu, Co-Founder & CEO
The VeriTrack system is built around a patented capacitive pressure sensor made of - of all things - wrinkled metal. Placed on the skin over a palpable artery (during surgery, usually the dorsalis pedis artery on the foot), it feels the artery push against it with every beat. As pressure rises, the signal intensifies; as it falls, the signal dampens. Proprietary algorithms turn that rhythm into a number, in real time, streamed over Bluetooth to a tablet.
Side by side with an arterial line - the instrument it hopes to replace - the sensor tracked rapid pressure swings almost perfectly. It is soft, it is flexible, and it does not break the skin. The company has submitted it for FDA 510(k) evaluation. It is not yet commercially available.
The soft sensor adheres over a palpable artery like a bandage - no cuff, no line.
Each pulse presses the wrinkled-metal capacitor; the signal rises and falls with pressure.
Proprietary algorithms convert the waveform into beat-to-beat blood pressure.
Readings flow over Bluetooth to a tablet for clinicians to watch in real time.
A once-a-year cuff reading catches a single moment. Blood pressure, though, is a moving thing - it spikes, dips, and reacts, especially right after the breathing pauses of sleep apnea. Vena Vitals says it is the first technology able to quantify those post-apneic spikes as they happen. The illustration below sketches the difference between what a cuff sees and what a continuous sensor sees.
Illustrative only - waveform is a schematic, not clinical data.
CEO Ray Liu and scientific founder Michelle Khine first met as graduate lab mates at UC Berkeley more than two decades ago, working on biomedical sensing before their paths split - Liu into industry, Khine into academia. The technology that became Vena Vitals grew out of Khine's UC Irvine lab and Josh Kim's PhD work. They reunited to build it.
A veteran of large medtech companies and digital-health startup exits. He brings the commercial and regulatory playbook.
UC Irvine biomedical engineering professor whose material-science work is the technical spark behind the sensor.
Developed the core technology during his PhD and was lead author on the seminal papers underpinning the device.
Continuous perioperative blood pressure without threading a line into an artery - the first market and the proving ground.
Quantify the blood pressure spikes that follow each apneic event - a signal the company claims no one else can capture.
The longer-term vision: remote patient monitoring and chronic-disease management, moving from bedside to bedroom.
Spun out of UC Irvine biomedical engineering research, with technology from Michelle Khine's lab and Josh Kim's PhD.
Joined YC alongside support from MedTech Innovator and EvoNexus.
A mix of venture capital and NIH/SBIR grants, plus a Proof of Product grant from Beall Applied Innovation.
VeriTrack submitted for clearance after validation on 600+ operating-room patients; hospital clearance anticipated this year.
We're the first and only technology that can quantify blood pressure spikes immediately after apneic events.Ray Liu, Co-Founder & CEO
CEO Ray Liu has walked through the technology on the Life Science Intelligence stage. Interviews and demos:
Return to that operating room. The needle in the wrist did its job for decades, but it always asked something of the patient in return - a puncture, a risk, a specialist's steady hand. Vena Vitals is betting the next version of that room looks different: a soft square on the foot, a steady stream of numbers on a tablet, and a truth that keeps arriving long after the surgery ends and the patient goes home.
The cuff has barely changed in a century. If Vena Vitals is right, the thing that finally changes it will be smaller than the palm of your hand, and you will barely feel it there.
Continuous. Noninvasive. Blood pressure. That's the whole pitch - and most of the work is making it boring enough to trust.