Digital health · Wearables
Airo Health
A Kitchener, Ontario startup that pitched a spectrometer wristband for reading nutrition from blood, then went through Y Combinator and narrowed the whole idea down to one job: catching anxiety before the wearer notices it. The company is now inactive.
Two devices, one wrist
On October 28, 2013, a Kitchener-Waterloo startup called Airo Health announced a wristband named AIRO. It promised something no fitness band on the market did: it would look at the wearer’s blood, through the skin, with an embedded spectrometer, and tell them what they had just eaten.
“As your body breaks the food down, the sensor can detect the amount of light that passes through the blood based on green, red and infrared patterns,” co-founder and then CEO Abhilash Jayakumar told Engadget the day of the launch. The same device also used heart rate variability to estimate stress, tracked exercise intensity through heart rate and calorie burn, and inferred sleep stages from the nervous system. Four systems, one wristband, no manual logging.
Pre-orders opened that day at $149, rising to a $199 retail price, with a first production run capped at 5,000 units and a shipping target of fall 2014, according to TechCrunch’s coverage.
By the time the company resurfaces in the record with a Y Combinator listing, the pitch has changed completely. The current Y Combinator page describes Airo as an armband that “sits on your arm and automatically tracks when you’re getting anxious and recommends easy tweaks that reduce stress.” Nutrition, exercise and sleep are gone. What is left is the heart rate variability piece of the original device, repositioned as a dedicated mental health product.
Three Waterloo engineers
Airo Health was founded in early 2013 by three University of Waterloo engineering graduates, Naman Kumar, Emmanuel DeVries and Abhilash Jayakumar, and grew to five employees by the time AIRO launched, according to the company’s own 2013 announcement. The team worked out of VeloCity Garage, a University of Waterloo backed co-working space for student and alumni startups. Velocity’s own company directory lists Airo Health as joining in 2013, in the health sector, with a status of inactive, an independent record that lines up with the company’s own account of its founding date.
By around 2018, the public face of the company had changed. A leadership page on the company’s own site names only two founders, Naman Kumar and Maryam Jahed, and opens with the line “this is our fifth year,” which points back to the 2013 start date. Naman Kumar wrote of the years before the pivot: “I gained 100lbs of extra weight. My stress levels just went through the roof. My relationships started suffering. So did work.” Maryam Jahed wrote about the people she had heard from: “high performing people who felt lonely and overwhelmed because life was just going too fast for them.”
A resume aggregator, RocketReach, lists Naman Kumar’s work history as founder and CEO of Blacktree Fitness Technologies from 2013 to 2016, then founder and CEO of a company from 2017 to 2019 with a Y Combinator entrepreneurship credential dated 2016, then a product role at Dapper Labs, and as of 2026 a VP role at a company called Inference HQ. Blacktree Fitness Technologies does not appear by that name in any of the 2013 press coverage of AIRO, which used the name Airo Health throughout, so it is unclear whether Blacktree was an earlier legal name for the same entity or a separate venture Kumar ran in parallel. A Product School instructor bio for Kumar says he “founded a Y Combinator-backed startup (25 people)” and lists his title as “Sr. Product Manager, Airo Health,” a headcount above the 2 to 10 employees LinkedIn shows today.
The pivot
Y Combinator’s own database entry for Airo Health, archived by third party trackers, places the company in the Summer 2016 batch, based at the time in Sunnyvale, California. That timing matches Naman Kumar’s YC entrepreneurship credential and the RocketReach date for the start of his second Airo Health stint as founder and CEO.
Somewhere between the 2013 AIRO wristband and the YC batch, the multi-sensor pitch was dropped for a narrower one: passive anxiety detection. The company’s site by 2018 and 2019, archived under airohealth.co, describes a product that tracks stress all day, alerts the wearer when stress is rising, and shows daily, weekly and monthly stress patterns. A capture of the airohealth.com domain from January 2019 shows the homepage redirecting straight to a page called anxiety-tracker, which is as clean a record of the repositioning as exists. The wristband’s claim to detect what a user ate is gone from every later version of the site found in this research.
The site cites “40 years of research” on heart rate variability and stress, listing papers from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Columbia University’s psychiatry department, a German group and a Houston VA group, described as background research, not studies of the Airo device itself.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA clearance | No 510(k) or PMA record for Airo Health, AIRO or Blacktree Fitness Technologies turned up in FDA databases as of this research. The product was marketed as a consumer wellness device, not a cleared medical device. | Not found |
| Nutrition sensing claim | The 2013 wristband claimed to measure caloric intake and meal quality via a skin spectrometer. No independent lab test or peer reviewed validation of that claim was found. The feature does not appear on the company’s later, pivoted site. | Company-stated |
| Anxiety detection claim | The later site claims Airo can detect rising stress and alert the wearer, built on heart rate variability. The cited research supports HRV as a marker of stress and depression in general; none of the cited papers study the Airo device or app specifically. | Company-stated |
| Shipping | Pre-orders opened October 2013 with a fall 2014 ship date and a 5,000 unit cap on the first run. No delivery confirmation, review of a received unit, or shipping update was found in this research. | Not found |
| SEC funding record | No Form D filing under Airo Health, AIRO or Blacktree Fitness Technologies was found in EDGAR. | Public record |
| Y Combinator | Listed by third party YC trackers in the Summer 2016 batch, based in Sunnyvale, California at the time. | Independent |
| Operating status | The company profile behind this page lists the company as Inactive. Velocity, the University of Waterloo incubator, independently lists Airo Health’s status as Inactive. A YC database mirror lists it as Dead. | Public record |
Read plainly: this is a company with two distinct products and no independent test of either one. The 2013 spectrometer claim and the later heart rate variability claim both rest on the company’s own descriptions, backed by general research on HRV rather than research on the Airo product. No regulatory filing, funding filing or delivery record was found to confirm what actually shipped or who actually paid for it.
What to watch
- Whether the original AIRO wristband ever shipped to pre order customers is not established in the public record found here.
- The relationship between Blacktree Fitness Technologies and Airo Health, both listed against Naman Kumar in the same 2013 to 2016 window.
- Whether Naman Kumar’s later roles, at Dapper Labs and now a company called Inference HQ, mark a full exit from Airo Health or simply confirm it wound down.
In their words
“As your body breaks the food down, the sensor can detect the amount of light that passes through the blood based on green, red and infrared patterns.”
Abhilash Jayakumar, co-founder and CEO, Engadget, Oct 28, 2013 · Company statement
“AIRO is transforming the wearable health industry, and we’re excited to give consumers the ability to monitor their wellbeing in a way that has never before been possible.”
Abhilash Jayakumar, co-founder and CEO, company launch release via BetaKit, Oct 28, 2013 · Company statement
“We built AIRO to help people become more proactive about their health.”
Abhilash Jayakumar, co-founder and CEO, company launch release, Oct 28, 2013 · Company statement
“Airo Health is a fast growing Y Combinator-funded company building a next generation armband that has changed people think about their health.”
Airo Health, Y Combinator company page, accessed Sep 25, 2026 · Company statement
“I gained 100lbs of extra weight. My stress levels just went through the roof. My relationships started suffering. So did work.”
Naman Kumar, founder, company leadership page, circa 2018 · Company statement
“I believe we all have a super power. That one thing that makes us stand out from the crowd. For me, it’s connecting with others.”
Maryam Jahed, founder, company leadership page, circa 2018 · Company statement
“Naman Kumar, based in California, United States, is currently a VP at Inference HQ. Naman Kumar brings experience from previous roles at Dapper Labs, Airo Health, Blacktree Fitness Technologies and Research In Motion.”
RocketReach contact profile, accessed Sep 25, 2026 · Aggregator record
Related companies
Sources
- IndependentAIRO wristband tracks not just sleep, exercise and stress, but also what you eat
- CompanyAiro Health Introduces Flagship Wearable Health Monitor, the AIRO Wristband (press release, republished by Engadget)
- IndependentQuantified Self Tracker AIRO Charts Your Nutrition, Stress, Exercise, And Sleep
- IndependentWill the AIRO Health-Monitoring Wristband Kill the Activity Tracker?
- IndependentVelocity Incubator company directory entry for Airo Health
- CompanyAiro Health company page
- IndependentAiro Health Y Combinator database entry, Batch S16, Sunnyvale, CA
- CompanyAiro Health marketing site (detect anxiety passively)
- CompanyAiro Health leadership page
- Public recordairohealth.com homepage redirect to /anxiety-tracker
- Aggregator recordNaman Kumar contact and career history
- IndependentNaman Kumar instructor bio
- Aggregator recordAiro Health company summary, founding and status
- CompanyAiro Health company page
- Public recordEDGAR company search, no Form D under Airo Health, AIRO or Blacktree Fitness Technologies
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
