Medical devices & diagnostics · Heart failure
Selera Medical
A two person startup that set out to break the fluid overload cycle in heart failure with one stent at the junction where the lymphatic system drains into the veins. One trial was registered. It was withdrawn before a single patient enrolled, and Y Combinator now lists the company as inactive.
The procedure on paper
The plan was written down in enough detail that anyone can read it. A patient with chronic heart failure, still congested on the highest diuretic dose they can tolerate, lies on an angiography table. The operator takes the femoral vein, or the brachial vein if the pre-procedure CT favors it.
A catheter goes up into the heart for pressure measurements. Then it travels the other way: through the subclavian vein and backwards into the thoracic duct, the main drain of the body’s lymphatic system, which empties into the vein at the base of the neck. Pressure is measured on both sides of that junction. Then, in the words of the registered protocol, a “Standard vascular stent deployed in subclavian vein and into lymphovenous junction”. Catheters out, compression on. Phone calls on day 2 and day 7, clinic visits at one, three and six months.
That registry entry is the clearest public description of what Selera Medical was trying to do. It is also the only one, because the study it describes never enrolled anybody.
The problem it picked
Heart failure is a pump problem that shows up as a plumbing problem. When the heart cannot move blood forward well enough, pressure backs up, fluid leaks out of the capillaries, and most of it settles not in the bloodstream but in the interstitium, between the cells. Diuretics pull from the bloodstream, which holds the smaller share.
The lymphatic system is the return road for the rest, and in heart failure it has to push against the same high venous pressure that caused the leak. It eventually loses. That physiology is well described: reviews in JACC in 2021 and in JSCAI in 2023 both treat the lymphatic system as an under used target in congestion. The target is real and the biology is published. What was missing, for Selera as for everyone else here, was evidence in patients.
Two engineers out of Biodesign
Stacie Arechavala and Kevin Bui met in the 2021 to 2022 Stanford Biodesign Innovation Fellowship. Their team had four people: the two engineers plus two physicians, Ankit Garg and Paola Calvachi. Arechavala had been an R and D engineer at Medtronic, then ran strategy and operations at an early stage healthtech company. Bui came straight from a PhD in bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, on robotics and stroke rehabilitation.
When the fellowship ended, the physicians went to commitments they had already made and the engineers took the idea forward, with Garg advising the clinical work. They won Biodesign summer extension funding and spent it on three risks: whether the mechanism would do what the literature implied, whether the device was buildable, and whether they could operate in a patent landscape Arechavala called very crowded.
By the end of that summer they thought all three were survivable. They entered Fogarty Innovation’s Invention Accelerator Program, converted a provisional patent into a non provisional application, built first prototypes and ran first preclinical studies with the contract lab Veranex. In December 2023 Fogarty announced them as the newest member of its Company Accelerator Program.
Eleven months
Then the clock ran fast. Selera joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch and launched publicly on February 28, 2024. Tracxn records a $500,000 seed round in April 2024 from a single institutional investor, the size and shape of Y Combinator’s standard deal. On August 15, 2024 a trial appeared on ClinicalTrials.gov: FLOWS-HF, sponsored by University Hospital, Grenoble in France, with Selera Medical listed as the collaborator.
On December 20, 2024 the record was updated to WITHDRAWN. Actual enrollment: 0. The reason given in the registry field is three words long: “stop financial collaboration”.
Since then: no FDA submission on record, no publication, no press release, no product. The company site has carried the same placeholder on every Internet Archive capture from March 2, 2024 to December 26, 2025, and still carried it on September 24, 2026: “We’re under construction. Please check back for an update soon.” Y Combinator’s directory record now carries the status Inactive and lists both founders as no longer active.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA records | No 510(k), PMA or De Novo entry in the databases pulled on Sep 24, 2026. No breakthrough device designation and no investigational device exemption found. Nothing the company built has been cleared or approved by any regulator. | Not found |
| Registered trial | NCT06554912, FLOWS-HF. Lead sponsor University Hospital, Grenoble; Selera Medical listed as collaborator. Posted Aug 15, 2024. Single group, open label, no masking. Status WITHDRAWN at the Dec 20, 2024 update. Actual enrollment 0. | Public record |
| Why it stopped | The registry why stopped field reads “stop financial collaboration”. Neither sponsor nor company has published anything further. | Public record |
| Preclinical work | The company said in Dec 2023 it had built first prototypes and run first preclinical studies with Veranex. No species, model, sample size or result has been published. | Company-stated |
| Peer reviewed papers | None found in PubMed for the company or its device as of Sep 24, 2026. | Not found |
| Patents | The company said it converted a provisional into a non provisional application. No issued patent or published application naming Selera Medical surfaced on Sep 24, 2026. | Company-stated |
| Federal funding | No NIH or NSF award to Selera Medical. The NSF rows returned by the automated pull belong to unrelated institutions. | Not found |
| Company status | The Y Combinator directory record carries the status value Inactive, team size 2, and both founders flagged as not active, Sep 24, 2026. | Public record |
| Website | A “Coming Soon” placeholder on every archived capture from Mar 2, 2024 to Dec 26, 2025 and on the live page Sep 24, 2026. | Public record |
| Reported funding | Tracxn lists one $500,000 seed round, April 2024, one institutional investor. No Form D in SEC EDGAR. | Data provider |
Read plainly: this company got a long way on paper and no distance at all in a body. The mechanism has literature behind it, the protocol was specific, a university hospital agreed to run it, and then the money stopped and the study was withdrawn with nobody enrolled. There is no preclinical dataset in the public record to fall back on, no publication, no patent and no regulator interaction. The clearest artifact Selera leaves behind is the FLOWS-HF registry entry.
What to watch
- Whether a patent application naming Selera Medical publishes. A non provisional filed in 2023 would normally have surfaced by now.
- Whether the FLOWS-HF protocol is revived in Grenoble under a different collaborator.
- WhiteSwell, the closest funded comparator. Its eLym system holds FDA breakthrough device designation and reported six month results from 40 patients in the single arm DELTA-HF trial in May 2026, with two procedure related serious adverse events including one death. A randomized trial, LYMPH-HF, is planned.
- Whether anyone runs a sham controlled trial of thoracic duct decompression. Every published human result here is single arm and small, including a 2025 feasibility study in four patients.
In their words
“Our system targets fluid retention directly as a chronic treatment for HF in order to improve quality of life, reduce hospitalizations and associated mortality,”
Stacie Arechavala, co-founder and CEO, Fogarty Innovation, 2023 · Interview
“With a problem as big as HF, we knew we needed to come up with a radically different methodology,”
Stacie Arechavala, Fogarty Innovation, 2023 · Interview
“During the IAP, we went through the process of converting our first provisional patent into a non-provisional patent application,”
Kevin Bui, co-founder and CTO, Fogarty Innovation, 2023 · Interview
“Early clinical data demonstrating proof-of-concept would truly unlock the next phase of our project and company,”
Stacie Arechavala, Fogarty Innovation, 2023 · Interview
“Standard of care medications to manage fluid hasn’t changed in over 60 years, have adverse side effects, require significant provider time, and become ineffective over time.”
Selera Medical launch post, Y Combinator, 2024 · Company
“The placement of the atrial shunt device did not reduce the overall rate of heart failure events, or improve health status in these patients,”
Sanjiv Shah, MD, on REDUCE LAP-HF II, TCTMD, 2022 · Independent
“Given all the strong harms we saw with absolutely no signs of benefit anywhere, if I’m designing future trials of interatrial shunts, it’s going to be in patients with reduced ejection fraction,”
Gregg Stone, MD, on RELIEVE-HF, TCTMD, 2024 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordClinicalTrials.gov NCT06554912, FLOWS-HF
- Public recordY Combinator company directory record for Selera Medical
- Public recordSEC EDGAR full text and company searches, no Form D
- Public recordFDA device databases, NIH RePORTER, NSF and PubMed pulls
- Public recordseleramedical.com home page
- InterviewNew CAP Selera Takes an Innovative Approach to Managing Chronic Heart Failure
- IndependentREDUCE LAP-HF II: Atrial Shunt Device Comes Up Short in HFpEF
- IndependentInteratrial Shunt Falls Short in Sham-Controlled RELIEVE-HF
- IndependentDirect Interstitial Decongestion in an Animal Model of Ischemic Heart Failure
- IndependentPathophysiology of the Lymphatic System in Patients With Heart Failure
- IndependentRole of Lymphatics in Heart Failure
- IndependentLymphatic Drainage in Patients with Heart Failure: A Feasibility Study
- IndependentWhiteSwell’s eLym System Receives FDA Breakthrough Device Designation
- Data providerSelera Medical company profile and funding
- CompanySelera Medical: Disrupting the heart failure treatment paradigm
- CompetitorWhiteSwell Announces Primary Clinical Trial Results, DELTA-HF
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
