Portrait No. 001
Maria Artunduaga
Founder and CEO
Samay
Raised — $7M
Samay builds the world's first acoustic wearable to diagnose and monitor lung disease at home. Our chest sensor Sylvee sends sound through the lungs and reads what comes back, detecting COPD with 93% accuracy, no hospital required. I started Samay because my grandmother Sylvia died from a misdiagnosed COPD exacerbation in Colombia. I was training as a plastic surgeon at the University of Chicago when it happened. I watched my family suffer an entirely preventable death and realized nothing existed to monitor lungs outside a hospital. So at 34, I left surgery, enrolled in engineering school, and built what I wished had existed for her. I named the device Sylvee after her. \"Samay\" means \"to breathe deeply\" in Quechua. This is personal. Every signal Sylvee sends carries her name.
In her words
“I built Samay through four years of IVF, multiple heartbreaks, and a dream I refused to let go. Today I build for the patients who look like my abuela — and for the daughter who made it all worth it.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
I look nothing like the typical medtech CEO. I'm a Colombian immigrant, a Latina, a mother, and I speak English with an accent. Investors have told me to my face that I carry a \"high-risk founder profile.\" There is no template, so I'm writing one. I built this company while pregnant. I funded it through grants when traditional VC doors stayed shut and turned that constraint into a strategy. I pitched hundreds of times, got rejected most of them, and kept going. The results speak for themselves. I've raised over $5.2 million and still own 85% of the company. I won the 2024 MedTech Innovator Grand Prize, the first Latin American company in the program's 12-year history to be accepted and to win. The American Thoracic Society named us the 2025 Innovation Success Story. Global pharma strategics like Chiesi Farmaceutici now pay us to build AI detection algorithms, all pre FDA, with a $20M pipeline to close within the next year. Colombia’s leading payer invests in Samay and helps us deploy across 20 million people in Latin America while we pursue FDA clearance by 2029. I hold 18 patents and have won over 60 prizes and publications, including in Nature and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Chapter II
Your vision.
Your lungs are the only vital organ you cannot monitor at home. You track your heart rate, your blood sugar, your blood pressure, but your lungs? You drive to a hospital and blow into a machine invented in the 1800s. COPD kills more people than breast cancer and diabetes combined. Millions die not because treatments don't exist, but because diagnosis never reaches them. I refuse to accept that. I'm building a world where a low-cost sensor on your chest tells you and your doctor what's happening inside your lungs, in real time, at home, anywhere. Our team in the Bay Area architects the technology and works daily with our engineers and clinical operations in Colombia, where we're de-risking with real patients and real payers before prime time in the US. I'm not improving the old system. I'm replacing it with something my grandmother deserved to have.
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 a young Latina to see my story and think: \"She did it. So can I.\" I want families in the Global South to access the same diagnostic power as any patient in the world's top hospitals. I want lung health to be as simple to track as a heartbeat. And I want every woman who heard \"you're too different to lead in medtech\" to know that different was exactly what this industry needed. My grandmother's name lives in every device we ship. That is legacy.