Portrait No. 001
Guelay Bilen-Rosas
Founder &CEO
AyrFlo Innovation Labs, Inc.
Raised — $1.5MM
For years, I watched preventable breathing complications steal recoveries. Patients quietly slipping into respiratory failure in the PACU, on the floors, and in the ICU. As an anesthesiologist, even with “expert” airway skills, I could only react, not predict, because the most important signal, airflow, was invisible. We were forced to rely on proxies and late alarms, and too often the outcome didn’t change. The moment that broke me was watching a trainee, one week from graduation, miss five airway collapses in a single day. Not because they didn’t care, because you can’t teach what you can’t see. Then came the second struggle: building the solution. I was told repeatedly I wasn’t smart enough to be a scientist, an inventor, or a CEO, especially not in deep tech. But patients don’t get to wait while we debate who “belongs” here. So I built AyrFlo anyway, because this gap is unacceptable.
In her words
“When patients stopped breathing, they said, ‘that’s just the way it is.’ When I reached higher, they said, ‘you can’t.’ AyrFlo is my answer: every breath visible, every outsider impossible to ignore.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
The hardest part of building AyrFlo has been living two full-time realities at once: being a physician responsible for lives in real time, and being a founder building the tool I wish I had at the bedside. I’ve built this company in the margins—between call shifts, after my kids go to sleep, in airports, and in the constant tension of “not enough hours, not enough people, not enough money.” As a woman, mother, and immigrant founder in deep tech, I’ve also faced the quieter barrier: skepticism disguised as “concern.” Even with an MD, and a career proving I can master complexity, some still didn’t believe I was worth betting on, that I could grow, learn, and lead a highly technical team. I’ve heard versions of: you’re not technical enough, not smart enough, not the right profile for a hardware CEO. So I let the work answer. We’ve raised $1.5M+, secured a worldwide exclusive WARF license, grown to 21 pending and 8 granted patents, filed our first AyrFlo-owned provisional, recruited exceptional talent, and pushed our sensor into manufacturing: miniaturizing a ~400-lb clinical capability into a wearable form factor. I didn’t wait for permission. I built anyway.
Chapter II
Your vision.
I’m obsessed with one injustice: in modern medicine, we still guess at physiology, and patients pay for it. I’ve watched mothers and fathers beg us to look again. I’ve watched clinicians, brilliant, exhausted, understaffed, forced to make life-and-death calls with incomplete signals. And I’ve watched bias, training variability, and sheer fatigue shape what we “believe” a patient is experiencing, because we don’t have objective data that shows the truth in real time. My vision is to bring vital and complex physiological monitoring for breathing, into the modern era. Humans are complex, so our sensors must be, too: accurate, continuous, diagnostic-grade, and built to capture physiology as it actually behaves. When we make breathing visible, we create a shared language between patients and clinicians, one grounded in data, not guesswork. That is the change I want: earlier detection, precise intervention, and fewer families losing someone because we were flying blind.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
Thirty years from now, I want my legacy to be simple: I helped shift who gets believed. Not because of a title, a résumé, or fitting a familiar mold, but because a person shows up with a clear vision and the courage to build it. I want fierceness to be recognized as devotion, and bold dreams to be met with support instead of skepticism. If AyrFlo succeeds, I hope it opens doors that used to be locked, so the next “unexpected” founder doesn’t have to prove their worth ten times over before someone finally says, “I believe you.”