Huneo, LLC. is all about the data.
The young Cleveland, Ohio-based startup is looking to use its IT expertise to help capture and send data in real time to several different types of doctors for a number of different health applications — sleep studies, heart studies and athletic performance monitoring, for example.
Huneo fills a gap in traditional databases, CEO & co-founder Phil Ryder said. Most can’t handle the fire hose of information associated with real-time capture, in which data is recorded as often as 100 times per second, according to Ryder.
"Lots of data from lots of people," Ryder said. "That’s what our strength is."
Sensing growing demand for real-time data in the health industry, Ryder and his two partners formed Huneo to capitalize on real-time data capture prowess they honed in the manufacturing industry. Real-time data could improve care, monitoring and diagnosis as patient health data streams in and is immediately available to doctors.
Huneo manufactures small, wireless sensors that attach to patients and gather health information, but the company’s focus is on the data rather than on the sensors.
“The whole idea of what we’re doing is very low-cost data acquisition," Ryder said. "The value is in having and presenting data — not the devices themselves."
Huneo’s first foray is in sleep studies, so it helps that one of the company’s founding partners, Dr. Jed Black, is the former director of the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic. A sleep medicine professor at Stanford, Black took a leave of absence from the Palo Alto-Calif.-based university to pursue research interests.
Using Huneo’s small sensors and cloud-based data storage, sleep studies can be conducted in patients’ homes rather than sleep medicine centers. Doctors can access and monitor data via Huneo’s web-based interface.
So far, the company is self- and angel-funded, and has pulled in a dollar amount “in the six figures," Ryder said. Later this year, Huneo may shop around for a series A investment round between $2 million and $5 million to fund a bid for regulatory clearance for its software and devices, and to hire new workers, develop software and manufacture sensors.
“Our core infrastructure is really solid and in place, but we have ongoing development of applications targeted towards different types of physicians," he said.