Four years ago, Deepika Bodapati was up late, staring at her computer and doing something rather unusual for a founder of a startup soon to achieve unicorn status: she was reading all the support tickets that came through her company, Athelas’, website. “Once in a while, we’ll have our employees’ parents write in,” Bodapati says with a laugh. “But I read every single thing because I just thought it was super interesting.” As Bodapati waded through the queries and suggestions, studying how her sales team handled issues, she noticed one woman, Dr. Deanna Kelley, writing in again and again.
“She was very persistent,” Bodapati recalls. Dr. Kelly, Chief and Director of the Treatment Research Program at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, was asking to study the Athelas One device, claiming she could help Bodapati further develop and test the machine. Bodapati knew that she and her co-founder, Tanay Tandon, were looking at an arduous application process for their second FDA clearance and would need all the support they could get. So Bodapati did what she was best at: she picked up the phone and listened to what Dr. Kelly had to say. This approach has come to define her ability to build both a better product and a better business.
Four years ago, Deepika Bodapati was up late, staring at her computer and doing something rather unusual for a founder of a startup soon to achieve unicorn status: she was reading all the support tickets that came through her company, Athelas’, website. “Once in a while, we’ll have our employees’ parents write in,” Bodapati says with a laugh. “But I read every single thing because I just thought it was super interesting.” As Bodapati waded through the queries and suggestions, studying how her sales team handled issues, she noticed one woman, Dr. Deanna Kelley, writing in again and again.
“She was very persistent,” Bodapati recalls. Dr. Kelly, Chief and Director of the Treatment Research Program at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, was asking to study the Athelas One device, claiming she could help Bodapati further develop and test the machine. Bodapati knew that she and her co-founder, Tanay Tandon, were looking at an arduous application process for their second FDA clearance and would need all the support they could get. So Bodapati did what she was best at: she picked up the phone and listened to what Dr. Kelly had to say. This approach has come to define her ability to build both a better product and a better business.
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Listening has always been central to Bodapati’s creative process. Listening closely to both the data and her intuition led to the Athelas One, which is the only FDA-approved, internet-connected finger-prick device that tests white blood cell and neutrophil counts at home and then shares that information directly with healthcare providers. The Athelas One is a small black cylinder, similar in appearance to an Alexa device. In a traditional lab, pathologists take a drop of blood, put it on a slide, smear and stain it and place it under a microscope to determine cell counts. Athelas One uses computer vision and machine learning to automate the process, and then sends the information to a healthcare team. Athelas is a leader in producing portable devices for remote patient monitoring (RPM), a growing sector of the global healthcare market that may be worth more than $175.2 billion by 2027. The need for such an industry was revealed during the pandemic, but RPM can benefit anyone from patients with chronic diseases who need to consistently track their medical data, to elderly or disabled individuals for whom a trip to the doctor’s office can be cumbersome.
As lifelong scientists, the founders knew Athelas One needed data proving, beyond doubt, that it worked consistently and accurately; as entrepreneurs, they knew a trial, as soon as possible, would be essential for the company’s development. When the duo participated in Y Combinator, they found themselves among a handful of potential competitors—but none of them had run a clinical trial yet. Bodapati and Tandon knew this could make them stand out to potential customers, partners and collaborators. “There was no option,” Bodapati says. “There would be no company if there was no trial.”
Setting up a clinical trial is complicated, and, through an acquaintance, Bodapati had a lead on a hospital in Juarez, Mexico, a city of 1.5 million across the border from El Paso, Texas. In 2016, Bodapati and Tandon conducted their first clinical trial for Athelas One.
