The inside story of Quanttus, a failed health tech start-up whose alums are now health leaders at Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and other giants.
In 2012, a group of entrepreneurs and academics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hatched a plan to solve one of the holy grails in health tech.
Notable alums include co-founder David He, an MIT researcher who went on to become the technical lead at Alphabet's health tech group, Verily, bringing at least three top engineers with him. His labmate on the academic project, Eric Winokur, did not join Quanttus but went on to join Apple as an engineer behind the original Apple Watch heart rate monitor.
If these tech giants succeed, Quanttus may turn out be the most influential failed tech company since General Magic, which anticipated the mobile revolution in the early 1990s and boasts alums like Android co-creator Andy Rubin, iPod creator and Nest co-founder Tony Fadell and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
He had created some noise in the academic community with an early prototype of a device that could measure the heart's electrical signal from the ear. But He's driving passion was to help people with high blood pressure. Khosla found the vision compelling enough to lead a small seed round of about $3 million, turning the academic idea into a start-up.
The two companies never formed any official partnerships, but employees on both sides recall regular meetings. One person recalls sharing some early data with Apple, and another described confidential talks about a joint development project related to blood pressure. While Apple remained mum about its plans, as it typically does, Quanttus shared some data and kept the company apprised of its key milestones.
It was so far ahead of its time that former employees say it was challenging to find suppliers who could execute on that vision. The closest thing to it is a watch that LG released in March 2018, years after the Quanttus design was hatched.Blood pressure is known to decrease at night, but it's almost impossible to track with a cuff that is programmed to inflate and deflate every twenty minutes — it's bulky and annoying, and wakes the patients up.
For starters, the entire question of how to measure blood pressure is controversial. The scientific community disagrees whether the"gold standard" should be measurements from an inflatable cuff, which can be done with inexpensive home cuffs, or an arterial line, which needs to be done at the hospital.
Whatever the reasons, when the company started doing clinical studies in a broader population of a few hundred people, the results simply weren't good enough. International standards from groups like the AAMI accept an error of no more than 5 mm Hg and a standard deviation of no more than 8 mm Hg. As one former employee put it,"When it worked, there was some signal, but when it didn't, we could never really figure out why.
Quanttus' then-CEO Azim regrets that decision and thinks the company could have benefited from keeping more watches into users' hands. For instance, he says, one former employee found out he had an undiagnosed medical condition called sleep apnea by wearing the Quanttus watch at night. The company didn't last long after that. The new chief, Allison O'Hair, set about creating an app for logging health data measurements called Q Health, but that was a far cry from the original vision. The board wasn't convinced that the team could solve the problem of monitoring continuous blood pressure quickly enough, especially after outside consultants reviewed the data. In the end, they decided to shut the company down and write off the investment.
Other teams have subsequently looked at using radars and tiny mechanical pressure sensors as a way to solve the problem.
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