Maria Artunduaga
Samay
Across Latin America, respiratory disease is caught too late, and the communities that suffer most are the ones left out of the research and standards that shape lung care worldwide.
Better detection, built for the last mile
Samay is a binational deep tech company making early respiratory diagnosis accessible where it has never reached before. Its wearable chest patch, Sylvee, captures diagnostic-grade lung function data outside the hospital, in homes, rural clinics, and last-mile communities.
Founded by Colombian-American physician-scientist Maria Artunduaga, Samay was born from clinical insight and personal loss: her grandmother Sylvia died of a COPD exacerbation that existing tools failed to catch in time. Headquartered in Silicon Valley and powered by a team in Colombia, Samay reflects Maria’s conviction that solutions for underserved communities should be built with the people who live those realities, not designed for them from a distance.
A new standard for respiratory monitoring
Traditional testing asks patients who already struggle to breathe to blow forcefully into a tube, or travel hours for a CT scan. Sylvee simply listens. Using patented Active Acoustic Resonance and AI, the patch sends a gentle sound wave through the chest wall and reads how it changes through lung tissue, detecting small airway damage five years before standard tests can.
Samay pairs this with a diverse respiratory dataset from Latin America that is helping correct a longstanding bias in global lung care: medical AI trained largely on one demographic works least well for everyone else. As a woman and Colombian American founder in deep tech, Maria is proving that world-changing medical technology can come from Latin America.
Key enterprise results
patients tested with the AI-assisted platform
accuracy detecting early air trapping vs. gold-standard CT
issued/allowed patents across 17 jurisdictions
Samay is proving that deep tech built in Latin America, designed to reach the last mile, can set a new global standard for early lung disease detection.
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