Imagine if someone could take a voice sample from you and then tell you your cardiac health condition from it. Vital Audio, an NYU-incubated startup co-founded by Nyamitse-Calvin Mahinda (Tandon ‘23) and Harsh Sonthalia (Tandon ‘23), is yanking that concept from the realm of sci-fi into our current resource-strapped reality. Its software turns any phone into a clinical-grade data acquisition device, extracting heart rate, heart-rate variability, rhythm, and respiratory metrics from just a few seconds of speech. In a remote-health era dominated by wearables, turning the average phone into a state-of-the-art sensor promises to make access to remote monitoring more equitable while improving outcomes, reducing unnecessary hospitalizations and facilitating better allocation of care resources. 

The process begins with the patient being asked to repeat sentences or vocalize a sustained vowel sound via a traditional phone call. Vital Audio’s software uses digital signal processing to visualize the audio frequencies in the sample and analyze how they change over time, looking for patterns that correspond with clinical biomarkers. Once this first layer of processing is complete, a second layer leverages AI to flag anomalies and perform disease classification. Use cases for this abound. “So whether you're going to see a doctor virtually, being monitored remotely for a condition, going to be released from or admitted to the hospital or if a doctor wants to follow up with you, this will be the standard of care,” Mahinda tells me. “The patient's phone becomes a medical device to collect and process the data. The patient's voice becomes the biometric sample that lets us capture and report key data to the provider. So when I say we're leveraging patient-provider communication, I really mean it.”

Another significant value add is the streamlining of resource-intensive and often confusing patient screening processes. “All this–the phone calls, texts and so on–can be fully automated,” says Mahinda. “It flags when there's checkpoints that should be checked, it flags patients who need remote monitoring, and it does all that without needing any additional support from a human.” Simplicity of use as compared to the current landscape of specialized wearables and apps is a major market asset. “Experience and research show that requiring patients to use new devices or apps is often an impossible ask in real-life clinical situations, especially with older people uncomfortable with tech,” Mahinda explains. “Vital Audio removes these pain points by using familiar devices.”

Those pain points were already familiar to Mahinda from the personal tragedy that inspired his work. His mother died one night while he was at work and unable to take her call. “When my mother’s cancer went into remission, I noticed after-care got inconsistent and realized how important one phone call can be,” he recalls. This realization was cemented by early professional experiences as an EMT and a patient-access representative. By the time he made it to NYU Tandon’s biomedical engineering program, he was laser focused. “I built Vital Audio at Tandon as part of my thesis work,” Mahinda says. “I’ve been on both sides of the problem and my loss catalyzed my motivation to build.” Mahinda was introduced to his co-founder Sonthalia at NYU’s Future Labs incubator while looking for an expert coder and, between the two of them, the groundwork was laid for Vital Audio to incorporate in 2022 and jump right into the NYU entrepreneurial ecosystem. 

“Each stage of the NYU entrepreneurship pipeline provided something unique in the process of building or developing the product,” says Mahinda. The process kicked off with participation in the Tech Venture Workshop. “We started by really fine-tuning our problem statement,” he recalls. “This means hypothesis formulating, figuring out what needs we were meeting. This helped us build the product strategically from the start instead of taking it to the customer and having to make changes retroactively based on their reaction.” Getting a handle on what problems were being solved also bridged neatly into figuring out who they were being solved for. “Refining the problem statement helped us build the framework for customer discovery. This was where we were introduced to the concept of the initial target customer profile and the importance of honing down on it.” 

Honing down on customer discovery was a big priority once Vital Audio leveraged its momentum to earn a spot in the 2023 cohort of the NSF I-Corps program. “Here we did a deep dive into our business model by talking to hundreds of healthcare professionals to figure out what worked and what didn’t about the platform, things like use cases and points of friction,” says Mahinda. “This is where we established the relationships that allowed us to do the initial validation. The main takeaway was that the customer is the center of the building process, the business model and everything else. We have to alleviate pain and meet needs.” Listening to potential customers ended up informing an early and important pivot. “At first, we had focused on primary care but we decided to shift to specialty cardiac and pulmonary care. And we went from targeting physicians as our ideal customer profile to targeting institutions such as entire healthcare systems.” This renewed clarity kickstarted the company’s success as it earned numerous clinical partnerships, including ones with NYU Langone, ZipCare, Tele911 and GoHealth. 

On the back of this early promise, Vital Audio was selected for the inaugural cohort of the NYU Tech Venture Accelerator, the third and final phase of the Tech Venture Program. “TVA is where we fully refined our business model and target customer, building on the work we had done before,” Mahinda recounts. “We explored possibilities with business capacity, core development while building reliable and recognizable traction. We benefited from coaching, collaborations and mentorships on business-side subjects that helped us execute on many fronts in a short period of time. Market access memoranda, identifying insurance companies we could work with, strategy sessions…we covered serious ground.”   

With all this newfound momentum, funding and knowledge on their side, confidence is high. The progress made in the NYU entrepreneurial pipeline was rewarded with heightened visibility and funding, including a place in the fall 2023 cohort of the Techstars Los Angeles Accelerator and $3 million in seed funding from sources including Better Ventures, Vaark Ventures, NYU Langone Health Venture Fund and the NYU Innovation Venture Fund. And the team does not intend to slow down. “The technology is fully matured and being deployed as we speak,” Mahinda says. “We’ve built a reliable pipeline of about 500 hospitals and clinics that we’re working with. And for the next 12 months, our goal is roll-outs, unlocking revenue at scale and reaching for the North Star for the platform, which is making it the gold standard for anything remote patient care.”