With Uber Investor Driving, Cue Raises $7.5M for Personal Dx Device

Cue desktop device with cartridges (Cue image used with permission)

The VC who placed a $26.5 million bet on Uber in 2011 is now leading a $7.5 million investment round in Cue, a San Diego startup developing a wireless diagnostic device that enables consumers to run clinical lab tests at home to measure their own health.

In a statement from Cue yesterday, Sherpa Ventures managing director Shervin Pishevar said the five-year-old company is taking a unique approach to consumer health, and “is a prime example of the ‘on demand’ economy applied to health and wellness.”

Pishevar, who left Menlo Ventures to found San Francisco-based SherpaVentures in 2013 (with former Goldman Sachs Internet investor Scott Stanford), has gained visibility in recent years as a well-connected Silicon Valley VC with an inside track in consumer and social Web deals. In addition to Uber, the Iranian-born Pishevar put Menlo into Fab.com, Warby Parker, and Tumblr, and was an angel investor in TaskRabbit, Klout, and dozens more. A recent profile in Bloomberg Businessweek describes how Pishevar’s extensive network connects to such tech billionaires as Elon Musk, Hollywood power brokers like Jeffrey Katzenberg, and political strategists in the White House and elsewhere.

Presumably, Pishevar was responsible for getting some angel investors into the deal, which The Wall Street Journal identified as Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio, Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff, and former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina.

Cue desktop device, with cartridge inserted (photo courtesy Cue)
Cue desktop device, with cartridge inserted (photo courtesy Cue)

The company, which has 11 employees, also disclosed that Immortalana, a mini-fund founded by digital media executive Kelly Day and UCLA medical researchers Robin Farias-Eisner and Srinivas Reddy, also participated in the round as an angel investor. (Cue previously raised about $2 million from angel investors.) Farias-Eisner, a specialist in gynecologic cancer who serves as director of UCLA’s Center for Biomarker Discovery and Research, was named to Cue’s board of directors, along with Pishevar.

Yet Pishevar obviously was a key selling point for Cue founder and CEO Ayub Khattak, who told me by phone, “We were really happy to connect with him, because his record speaks for itself. We chose him—and he chose us on this technology that completely transforms how

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.