Kivo Health Raises $10M Series A for Virtual Lung Care

Stanford Health Care is now a clinical collaborator of the company its former resident helped build. For Kivo Health, that relationship places virtual lung rehabilitation inside a larger question: how does a recommended course of care become something a patient can actually attend?

Co-founder and CEO Victor Sadauskas, MD, and co-founder and CTO Vaughn Koch have built a US care business around chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. Kivo’s current Y Combinator profile confirms a $10M Series A. Axios reported the financing on October 23, 2026, with Allumia Ventures leading.

The investment reaches a company already working with health systems and payers on home-based pulmonary rehabilitation. Its opportunity sits in the distance between a clinical recommendation and sustained participation: supplying equipment, connecting patients with clinicians and making the next session practical. That puts care delivery, rather than a software download alone, at the center of Kivo’s commercial proposition.

What Kivo Health’s Series A is financing

Kivo’s funding supports an established virtual-care company, founded in 2021 and part of YC’s Winter 2023 batch. The financing was reported with participation from Y Combinator, Corewell Health Ventures, Heuristic Capital and MassMutual Ventures. The current company-authored YC profile confirms the round’s amount and Series A designation; the original reporting establishes its public announcement timing.

Allumia Ventures invests in healthcare companies and has roots in Providence’s venture operation. MassMutual Ventures’ Kivo portfolio page independently documents an investment relationship beginning in 2024. Those relationships supply context for the backers, although the primary materials reviewed do not identify a detailed allocation of the new proceeds or a valuation.

Sadauskas completed his medical residency at Stanford, according to his YC biography. Koch, the company’s technical co-founder, previously founded Movity, which was acquired by Trulia. Their current roles are confirmed on Kivo’s official leadership page. The pairing matters operationally because a virtual rehabilitation business has to coordinate clinical responsibility with equipment, connectivity and patient-facing software.

For an investor, that makes adoption unusually tangible. A referral, an enrolled patient and a completed course of care describe different points in the business, each requiring work before the next can happen. Funding gives Kivo additional resources while those clinical and commercial relationships continue developing; the published evidence does not justify inventing a hiring target or product roadmap for the round.

How virtual pulmonary rehabilitation reaches the home

Kivo’s current physician-facing program starts with a referral, medical review and an individual assessment. The company sends equipment to the patient and provides live rehabilitation led by licensed professionals. Its current materials describe a 9-week program, with monitoring and a report returned to the referring practice.

The patient kit includes a connected tablet, an oxygen monitor and exercise bands. Cellular connectivity has a practical role: participation can proceed without requiring the household to supply Wi-Fi or a suitable computer. That detail makes the company’s access proposition easier to understand than a general claim about making healthcare digital.

Kivo describes ongoing support after the initial rehabilitation program. In its Optum Arcadia partnership announcement, the company explains that technology supports health-data organization, care coordination and prioritizing outreach. Licensed healthcare professionals supervise the services, which can include exercise guidance, symptom education and remote monitoring.

The operating implication is that the technology serves several people with different needs. A patient needs a usable session; a therapist needs enough information to supervise it; the referring clinician needs communication about the course of care. Keeping those connections intact is part of the service a health system is buying. Shipping the equipment begins that relationship, with follow-through continuing well after the box arrives.

What the clinical evidence supports

A peer-reviewed study published in February 2025 examined 167 patients who completed Kivo’s virtual pulmonary rehabilitation program. The retrospective review compared participants using supplemental oxygen with those who were not. Both groups showed improvements in symptoms and functional exercise capacity, with high session attendance.

The evidence has a defined scope. It concerns selected program completers enrolled between October 2022 and November 2023, rather than every person referred to Kivo or every patient covered by a commercial partner. The historical protocol also used 8 weeks of rehabilitation, while the current product is described as 9 weeks. These distinctions help a reader understand which service and population the findings actually describe.

Clinical findings and financial projections require different questions. Kivo’s health-plan materials project a 3.1x return on investment from reducing healthcare utilization. A projected return is a commercial model, separate from a measured improvement in a study participant’s symptoms. Buyers evaluating the program need to understand the assumptions behind those economic estimates and how performance will be assessed in their own population.

For healthcare operators, this is where the sales conversation becomes a delivery conversation. DevCuration’s coverage of Medicare care coordination at Baba provides a related view of companies building around the work surrounding treatment. Enrollment, session participation, clinical progress and cost experience each tell a different part of the story. The financing makes Kivo a better-resourced participant in that discussion, while the patient and payer records still have to accumulate through actual care.

Partnerships give Kivo several routes to patients

Kivo’s June 2025 collaboration with Stanford Health Care positioned virtual pulmonary rehabilitation within an effort to advance care for COPD. Its Priority Health partnership, announced in December 2025, extended the company’s relationship with a Michigan health plan. The Optum Arcadia program followed in California in April 2026.

These announcements describe several ways a patient can enter a virtual-care service. A health system can connect a referral with treatment, while a health plan can evaluate access and utilization across its members. A partner’s overall membership or patient population should not be counted as Kivo enrollment, and a partnership announcement does not establish a completed clinical outcome.

That distinction also explains the investment story beyond the round size. Kivo is building relationships around a course of care that has to fit into somebody else’s referral process, clinical oversight and economic evaluation. Each new relationship adds another setting in which equipment, communication and continuing support need to hold together.

Sadauskas and Koch’s company now has fresh capital alongside those existing routes to patients. Inside a referring practice, the work remains concrete: identify the appropriate patient, complete the handoff and receive a useful account of the care delivered at home. Kivo’s expanding business will keep meeting that sequence one patient and one care team at a time.