Emergency physician. Y Combinator founder. CEO of Kivo Health - the startup bringing clinical-grade pulmonary rehabilitation home to the millions who never got it in the first place.
Every ER doctor knows the rotation. A patient with COPD comes in struggling to breathe, spends three days admitted, gets stabilized, and leaves. Six weeks later, they're back. Same patient, same room, same outcome. Victor Sadauskas saw this cycle enough times at Kaiser Permanente to know the system wasn't broken - it was just aimed at the wrong point in time.
The clinical evidence was clear: pulmonary rehabilitation - structured exercise, breathing training, and education - dramatically reduces hospital readmissions, improves functional capacity, and changes the disease trajectory. The American Thoracic Society had been recommending it for decades. And yet, fewer than 3% of eligible patients were actually getting it.
The problem wasn't awareness. It was access. Pulmonary rehab programs typically require patients to drive to a clinic two or three times a week for eight weeks. For elderly patients with limited lung capacity, that's not a recommendation - it's a barrier. For patients in rural areas, it's often impossible. So they don't go. And six weeks later, they're back in the ER.
Sadauskas founded Kivo Health in 2021 with co-founder and CTO Vaughn Koch to build the version of pulmonary rehab that the 97% could actually access. The premise was simple: bring the rehab to the patient, not the other way around.
Kivo ships a home kit directly to each patient - a tablet, oxygen monitor, wristband, and exercise bands. Then delivers an eight-to-nine-week Medicare-covered program of twice-weekly small group video sessions with licensed respiratory therapists, one-on-one assessments, health coach check-ins, guided breathing exercises, and real-time oxygen and heart rate monitoring. The clinics didn't follow the patient home. Kivo replaced the need for them to.
"This collaboration reflects a bold commitment to evidence-based innovation, health equity, and value-based care."- Victor Sadauskas, on Kivo Health's partnership with Stanford Health Care
Before Kivo, Victor Sadauskas was doing things that don't obviously go together. He was practicing emergency medicine at Kaiser Permanente while simultaneously working as a digital health investment analyst at Life Science Angels and consulting at Longitude Capital, a healthcare-focused venture capital firm.
The clinical work gave him the problem. The investment work gave him the frame. He understood what good clinical evidence looks like, and he understood what investors need to see. When he started Kivo, he wasn't guessing at product-market fit - he had spent years watching from both sides of the table.
Medical school at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, followed by an emergency medicine residency at Stanford, provided the clinical credibility that most digital health founders can't claim. His published research - 83+ citations - focused on areas like trauma wound management and pain control. He thought in evidence, not anecdote.
The UCSF Rosenman Institute for Health Innovation selected Sadauskas as an affiliate, a program that backs physician-founders commercializing healthcare innovations. It was an early signal that the medical establishment saw something legitimate in what he was building, not just another wellness app looking for a clinical veneer.
Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch was the inflection point. Kivo went through YC with a co-founder who brought the engineering foundation: Vaughn Koch, CTO, who built the platform that delivers the program at scale. The physician-engineer pairing is a classic startup archetype, but in Kivo's case it meant the product was built around clinical workflows, not despite them.
Kivo delivers ATS guideline-compliant pulmonary rehabilitation via telehealth, with outcomes matching or exceeding in-person programs - 24% symptom improvement, 34% gain in functional capacity.
Every patient receives a tablet, oxygen monitor, wristband, and exercise bands. The equipment removes the most common barrier: patients who can't get to a clinic can still get the program.
Announced in June 2025, the Stanford collaboration brings Kivo's AI platform into one of the most respected healthcare systems in the country, with access to thousands of new patients.
April 2026: Kivo launched AI-powered virtual lung rehab and care in California in partnership with Optum Arcadia, combining clinician-led care coordination with Kivo's AI monitoring platform.
$2.1M in annual revenue with a 14-person team - a lean, focused operation demonstrating that clinical credibility and unit economics can coexist in digital health.
Selected by Y Combinator in Winter 2023, Kivo joined a global cohort of companies reshaping their industries. For Sadauskas, Demo Day was just the beginning of a much longer build.
"Our goal is to ensure that geography and access barriers no longer determine who gets better."- Victor Sadauskas, Kivo Health
Digital health is cluttered with products that wear clinical language without clinical substance. Kivo is unusual because the clinical framework came first. Sadauskas understood pulmonary rehabilitation from the provider side before he understood it as a product to be built.
The result is a program that adheres to American Thoracic Society guidelines, delivers real-time physiological monitoring, employs licensed respiratory therapists, and generates outcomes data that healthcare systems actually trust. The 83% attendance rate - versus roughly 30% for traditional in-person programs - isn't a marketing number. It's evidence that removing the commute removes the biggest dropout driver.
The AI layer isn't cosmetic. Kivo's platform integrates cellular-enabled devices, real-time data analytics, and remote patient monitoring that flags changes before they become crises. The technology stack - built on React Native, Node.js, Docker, and IoT-connected devices - was designed to meet clinical standards, not around them.
The 56% reduction in hospital readmissions is the number that turns healthcare administrator conversations from "interesting" to "when can we start." In a value-based care environment where systems are accountable for readmissions, Kivo's ROI is measurable before the first program completes.
None of this happened by accident. It happened because the person who built the company had personally admitted the patients it was designed to prevent from coming back.