Neumitra also has a wrist-based device and is focusing on measuring and understanding stress and anxiety. Bobo Analytics is developing a wearable device and software, primarily targeting athletes for training purposes. Change Collective, led by Zeo co-founder Ben Rubin, is taking a software and content approach to behavior change via smartphones. MC10 has fundamental technology around flexible hardware and wearable electronics. Segterra has an online service that gives health and lifestyle recommendations based on a blood sample. And RunKeeper has a popular consumer app and health platform for tracking running and fitness.
The bigger emerging guys in the field are Apple, Google, Samsung, Nike, Fitbit, and Jawbone. Interestingly, that last one is backed in a big way by Khosla Ventures; there is speculation among outside experts I’ve talked to that whatever Quanttus develops will find its way into Jawbone products. In the meantime, Apple and Jawbone may be on a collision course when it comes to health monitoring.
Azim downplays the competitive aspects, of course. The big guys are “trying to go after a 200-million user base. For us, it’s about one use case at a time. The reason we exist is we ask fundamentally different questions,” he says. “They’re going after big swaths of the market. We’re solving big problems on a smaller subset of those.”
Maybe so, but if a company like Quanttus gets real traction—always a big if—one could imagine the data coming from wearable sensors would yield a huge amount of information and insights about patient populations and health trends.
From his Lantos experience, Azim brings two main lessons in building a healthtech company. First, he says, “focus on people” and assemble a “team that will be head and shoulders above what’s out there.” Second, he says, “optimize for the long run” and don’t focus too early on revenue or shipping a product.
Azim says he’ll be looking for new office space in the next few months to accommodate his team, which is on track to double to about 50 people this year. Boston observers might worry that with a prominent West Coast investor like Khosla, Quanttus will end up moving to San Francisco like so many startups before it. Azim admits there’s a “high likelihood” that the company will open a Bay Area office and become bicoastal.
But for now, he seems committed to expanding the technical team—hardware engineers, data scientists, and more—in the Cambridge/Boston area, where his team’s MIT network mostly remains.
“I see us growing in Kendall Square,” he says.
