Medical devices & diagnostics · Continuous blood pressure
Vena Vitals
A soft sticker, built on wrinkled metal from a UC Irvine lab, that reads blood pressure beat by beat. The company says its VeriTrack monitor is in front of the FDA. Nothing has appeared on the FDA’s public record yet.
A square on the foot
In an operating room, the instrument that tells an anesthesiologist the truth about blood pressure is a catheter threaded into an artery at the wrist. It is accurate, it is continuous, and it is the one piece of monitoring nobody looks forward to.
Vena Vitals puts something else on the patient: a soft, bandage-sized sensor, usually parked on the foot over the dorsalis pedis artery, out of the surgical field but still over a pulse. Every heartbeat presses it. The signal swells when pressure rises and softens when it falls, and algorithms turn the rhythm into numbers streamed over Bluetooth to a tablet.
“This is a massive unmet need in healthcare,” chief executive Ray Liu told UC Irvine’s applied innovation office in February 2026. The company says it has run the sticker beside an arterial line in more than 600 operating room patients at roughly eight hospitals, and that the two traces tracked together.
What the cuff misses
Blood pressure is not a number. It is a moving line. The arm cuff samples that line every few minutes and throws away everything in between, which is exactly where a hemorrhage or a crash in perfusion lives.
The record backs the gap. In its NSF Phase II abstract the company wrote that only 10 to 15 percent of surgical patients receive continuous monitoring, because the invasive procedure requires specialized skill and can introduce complications. The Phase I abstract gives the other side: more than 50 million surgeries happen annually in the United States, more than 85 percent of them relying on non-continuous cuffs. The 2021 validation paper reports that 30 percent or less of operating room and intensive care patients get an arterial line.
Two lab mates, twenty years apart
Ray Liu and Michelle Khine met around 2002 in the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center, where Liu was a National Science Foundation fellow working on transistors that could sense DNA. Then their paths separated. Khine became a professor of biomedical engineering at UC Irvine. Liu went into industry: global product surveillance at GE Healthcare, consulting under the Siemens banner, product and strategy roles at Socialwellth and Vizient, two health tech exits, and a Harvard MBA.
The third founder is Josh Kim, who built the technology during his PhD in Khine’s lab and is first author on the 2019 paper in Advanced Healthcare Materials describing wrinkled gold thin films as parallel plate electrodes in a soft capacitive pressure sensor. He is also the principal investigator on every federal award the company holds. They reunited in 2019 and incorporated in Irvine.
The university tie is tight. Nine of the fourteen employees are UC Irvine alumni, five with doctorates, and the company has held space at the Cove at UCI and at University LabPartners in the UC Irvine Research Park. An early Proof of Product grant from Beall Applied Innovation paid for roughly 30 interviews with anesthesiologists, which is how the operating room became the first market rather than the consumer wrist.
From the bench to the queue
The money arrived as grants before it arrived as equity. NSF gave a $256,000 SBIR Phase I in 2021 and a Phase II in 2023 since obligated $1.5 million, including a $500,000 Phase IIB increment in fiscal 2025. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute added four awards worth $1,445,563, split between an operating room alert system and beat-to-beat monitoring during sleep.
Part of the company then moved to Nevada. It has worked out of a lab on Roseman University’s Summerlin campus for about two years, recruited by the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance and the state economic development office, with an investment from Desert Forge Ventures. Y Combinator job listings show both Irvine and Las Vegas.
What has not arrived is a clearance. The website says the VeriTrack system was “recently submitted for FDA 510(k) evaluation” and is “not yet commercially available.” The FDA does not publish pending submissions, so silence proves nothing either way. It does mean that as of September 22, 2026, nothing about this device is cleared.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA status | The openFDA 510(k) database returns no matches for applicant Vena Vitals and none for a device named VeriTrack, checked Sep 22, 2026. Pending submissions are not published. | Public record |
| Company regulatory claim | The website states VeriTrack was “recently submitted for FDA 510(k) evaluation” and is “not yet commercially available.” In mid 2026 Liu put clearance “within the next few months.” | Company-stated |
| Registered trial | NCT06887465, an observational comparison of VeriTrack against radial arterial catheterization, 100 patients estimated, with Thomas Jefferson University, principal investigator Jeffrey Joseph, DO. Primary outcome is Bland-Altman agreement. Status is still NOT_YET_RECRUITING, estimated start June 2025, last updated Apr 3, 2025. | Public record |
| Peer-reviewed validation | Chou et al., Frontiers in Digital Health, 2021: 17 surgical patients, sensor versus arterial line. Waveform correlation above 0.89. Mean bias 1.92 mmHg systolic with SD 12.55 and 2.38 diastolic with SD 12.19. Post-hoc recalibration cuts the SD to about 7.4 and 7.2. | Peer reviewed |
| Algorithm work | Abiri et al., Scientific Reports, 2022: an intra-beat marker, Diastolic Transit Time, holds agreement with the arterial line for up to 20 minutes without recalibration. Drift is named as the field’s central problem. | Peer reviewed |
| The 600 patient figure | Stated by the company and repeated in UC Irvine and trade coverage: more than 600 operating room patients across about eight hospitals. No dataset or paper covering that cohort has been published. | Company-stated |
| Accuracy claim versus published numbers | The Y Combinator profile says the device is “as accurate as the best tools doctors have today.” The only published head to head data reports standard deviations above 12 mmHg before post-hoc recalibration, and the authors themselves describe drift in the system. | Claim exceeds the record |
| Federal grants | NSF SBIR Phase I 2036639, $256,000. NSF SBIR Phase II 2213169, $1,500,000 obligated to Feb 2027. NIH NHLBI R33HL163749 ($415,577 and $427,190), R43HL170868 ($295,924) and R43HL180283 ($306,872). Total on record $3,201,563, all with Joshua Kim as principal investigator. | Public record |
| Patents | One published US application names Vena Vitals, Inc. as assignee: US 2023/0380770 A1, application 18/447,128, filed Aug 9, 2023. No granted patent under the company name was found. | Public record |
| Cleared competitors | Caretaker Medical has held clearances for a continuous non-invasive blood pressure monitor since K151499 in 2016, most recently K251275 in Sep 2025. Biobeat cleared BB-613WP in 2019. PyrAmes cleared the Boppli infant monitor in Sep 2023. | Public record |
Read plainly: the science is real and federal reviewers have paid for it repeatedly, but the evidence that would justify replacing an arterial line is not public. Seventeen patients are in the literature. Six hundred are in the pitch. The trial that would bridge the two has not started, and the competitors with clearances are already selling.
What to watch
- An FDA decision. A clearance would appear in the openFDA database with a K number and a summary naming the predicate device.
- Whether NCT06887465 opens. The registry entry has not been touched since April 2025 and still lists an estimated start of June 2025.
- Publication of the 600 patient dataset, the difference between a claim and an argument.
- A first Form D, or a named and dated equity round. Neither exists on the SEC record today.
- The sleep indication, funded by two NIH awards and a different regulatory problem.
In their words
“Our blood pressures are constantly changing, but we only get snapshots in time using uncomfortable cuff compressions, or we need risky invasive procedures to track real-time changes”
Ray Liu, co-founder and CEO, UCI Beall Applied Innovation, 2026 · Independent
“We’re the first and only technology that can quantify the magnitude of blood pressure spikes immediately after apneic events.”
Ray Liu, UCI Beall Applied Innovation, 2026 · Company claim
“But we’ve always been about clinical impact. We didn’t want this to be another gadget you wear. We wanted it to be something that delivers true medical outcomes.”
Ray Liu, UCI Beall Applied Innovation, 2026 · Independent
“We’ve collected a lot of data already, about 600 patients across the country”
Ray Liu, Entrepreneur Loop, 2026 · Independent
“It’s hard to predict because the FDA is backed up quite a lot. But it should be soon. We’re hoping within the next few months.”
Ray Liu, on clearance timing, Entrepreneur Loop, 2026 · Independent
“While we do observe drifts in the system, we still obtain decent correlations with respect to the A-Line as evidenced by excellent linear fit and low mean bias across patients.”
Chou, Cheung, Maxwell, Pham, Khine and Rinehart, Frontiers in Digital Health, 2021 · Peer reviewed
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordopenFDA 510(k) database, queries for applicant Vena Vitals and device VeriTrack
- Public recordClinicalTrials.gov NCT06887465, Non-invasive and Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring
- Public recordNSF award 2036639, SBIR Phase I, with project outcomes report
- Public recordNSF award 2213169, SBIR Phase II and Phase IIB
- Public recordNIH RePORTER awards R33HL163749, R43HL170868 and R43HL180283
- Public recordUS patent application 2023/0380770 A1, Multi-channel array sensor for spatiotemporal signal tracking
- Public recordSEC EDGAR company search and full text search for Vena Vitals
- Peer reviewedClinical Validation of a Soft Wireless Continuous Blood Pressure Sensor During Surgery
- Peer reviewedSoft Wearable Pressure Sensors for Beat-to-Beat Blood Pressure Monitoring
- Peer reviewedIntra-beat biomarker for accurate continuous non-invasive blood pressure monitoring
- IndependentCan Wearable Tech Finally Get Blood Pressure Right?
- IndependentLas Vegas Startup Cracks Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring
- CompanyVena Vitals website, home and technology pages
- CompanyVena Vitals company profile and open roles
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
