Best of 2021: A Note from NuvoAir Founder and CEO

It’s never easy to write an end of year blog post summarizing a company’s key achievements, and this year is no different. Here at NuvoAir, we have so many things to celebrate and be grateful for that it is difficult to do it justice in a single blog post.

Before highlighting a few key achievements of the year as it ends, let me start by expressing my deepest gratitude to all the team at NuvoAir for their ongoing hard work and support. This year everyone has worked incredibly hard and our successes would not be possible without the contribution of every single team member. In a small company, the work of every person matters. Secondly, I want to thank our customers and our patients for believing in us. Their happiness when using our service is what gets us up every morning and helps us rally behind a common cause. And thirdly, I want to thank all of our investors, who have provided the resources to fuel our incredible journey thus far. Without them we would not be here.

2021 has been a year when we tried to find answers to many questions. Although we probably had more questions than answers, that’s OK. Finding those answers is part of the process of building a company. What we know for sure is that we want to fundamentally change the way healthcare is delivered. We want to provide a more patient and human-centric experience in a healthcare system that is still very broken and far too complex to navigate. Whether patients are enrolled in our clinical service or our clinical trial platform, we want to empower them and put them back in the driving seat. We want to provide an experience that our members love, help them live their lives to the fullest - and be paid only when we can demonstrate value for the services provided.

To do that successfully, we must expand our capabilities to fully meet our members’ needs wherever they are. A continuous, person-centered, relationship-based care package is required, particularly when supporting individuals with complex conditions such as COPD. This is why in 2021 we have expanded our product to include a clinical service. Our team of respiratory nurses, available at the patients’ fingertips, now supports them and their families wherever they are. Our technology platform amplifies and scales the empathy and care of our clinical team, so that patients feel safer and more cared for. We can deliver highly personalized and proactive care by combining best-in-class technology, deep clinical expertise and a data-driven infrastructure. Much more will happen on this front next year and we are really excited!

In 2021, our technology platform further expanded to also include highly relevant biomarkers. We have launched a cough app and an add-on sensor for asthma and COPD inhalers, Aos, which can improve medication adherence and inhaler technique. The add-on sensor, together with other key data points collected in our platform, provides invaluable data to our clinical team. It means they can stratify patients more effectively and nudge them at the right time to avoid expensive hospitalizations. And we are just getting started.

Our biomarkers are also integrated within our decentralized clinical trials platform, expanding opportunities for respiratory research. By bringing the trial to where the patients live, we have dramatically improved their experience. This has also reduced the burden for both patients and study sites. This year we passed 30 studies supported globally with our technology across all phases of drug development, involving over 2000 patients. This is an incredible milestone if we consider we launched our clinical trial offering just over 2 years ago.

Also this year, we have reached 15 peer-reviewed publications, further validating the impact we are making in patients’ lives. The extraordinary work we did with forward-looking providers is paying off and we are immensely grateful for their trust.

But all of this would have not been possible without our formidable team. In 2021, we doubled the size of the company, crossing the 50 employee mark. We have not just strengthened existing departments, but also built entirely new functions from scratch and hired a top-notch executive team. Beyond our already established presence in Stockholm, Sweden, we have also opened a new office in Boston, MA, and we are now active across two continents.

In 2021, many of us met for the first time. Before COVID it would have been unreal to consider this as something to celebrate, but in today's environment, re-establishing a human connection matters. It has been a great joy for everyone to meet in person, and made a difference to how we collaborate together.

2021 will also be remembered as the year we crystallized our values. Be patient obsessed; fail early to succeed sooner; act like an owner; focus on what matters; practice confident humility. These values are our North Star that will dictate how we behave, operate and recruit. An exercise that involved everyone in the organization. I am so proud of how we are living these values.

I cannot conclude this post without mentioning our Series A financing round, which added $12M to our balance sheet and, more importantly, new and precious capabilities to our Board of Directors. Our revenue doubled again this year and we are well positioned to reach our goals for next year.

To finish, here are three patient quotes which made us all proud in 2021:

“NuvoAir is helping a lot. The more I do it, the more it opens my airways.”

“NuvoAir’s clinical team is very helpful. When I need help they are there to answer my questions whenever I have them. My doctor doesn’t have the time for that.”

“I only see the doctor every now and then. Now I have someone watching me every day to check for anything wrong.”

I am looking forward to many more of these positive quotes in 2022!