MSIV Invests in Mill Valley’s Skribe Medical

Q&A with Co-Founder & CEO Ryan Neely

Monday, September 8, 2025 from Mill Valley, CA

In 2021, Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures launched the North Bay’s first regional venture capital fund and began deploying capital into Marin + Sonoma’s most promising startup companies.

Today, we are excited to share details around our investment in Skribe Medical, a medical technology company developing a novel wireless wearable patch that can predict and prevent heart damage during cancer therapy.

Skribe’s Body Resonant Power enables tiny satellite sensors anywhere on the body to harvest energy from a smartwatch, capturing the best data with a small, comfortable footprint. Instead of frequent office visits, cancer patients can wear the device at home to alert doctors in time to administer heart-saving medications.

Why We Invested

Skribe Medical is reimagining wearable heart monitoring to solve cardiotoxicity detection for 1.8 million American cancer patients at risk during treatment.

Many new, powerful cancer drugs help keep patients alive but have a terrible side effect of causing lasting damage to the heart. The potential cardiotoxicity of these treatments is well known, and current guidelines recommend an echocardiogram every 1-3 months to monitor heart health for these patients. Echocardiograms are expensive, only detect heart damage after it has occurred, and increase the burden on tired patients by requiring them to frequently return to a clinic for testing.

Skribe’s vision is a Band-Aid-like sensor worn over the heart that is capable of measuring changes in heart health caused by cancer drugs, such as declining left ventricular function. Their solution will simplify care delivery for doctors, improve cost efficacy, and safeguard the health of cancer survivors by providing early detection of heart damage.

Skribe's team has experience taking novel medical device technology from concept to FDA clearance – the three co-founders, including CEO Ryan Neely, CTO Josh Kay, and CSO Andrew Bohannon, all worked together at iota Biosciences, a Berkeley-incubated startup that achieved a $304 million exit in three years by developing wireless micro implants for hard-to-reach nerves and organs. They hold an incredible passion for easing the road to recovery for those undergoing cancer treatment, and we are privileged to back them.

MSIV helped lead Skribe’s pre-seed round of financing, and Skribe is using these funds to conduct pilot studies with partners at Stanford University and University of Rochester to further inform device development. The North Bay has a long history of successful medical device innovation, and we are pleased for the team at Skribe to help write that next chapter.

MSIV Founder & Managing Partner Zachary Kushel sat down with Skribe Medical Co-Founder & CEO Ryan Neely to discuss the evolution of cancer therapy and Skribe’s vision to better protect patients from heart disease during lifesaving therapies.

Skribe CEO Ryan Neely

ZK: Ryan, where did the inspiration come from for you and the team to launch Skribe Medical?

RN: My co-founders and I worked together at iota Biosciences, but I left in 2021 to join a biotech startup where we tested cancer drugs against organoids that we grew out of patient tumors. As part of my role, I experimented with most FDA-approved cancer drugs on the market, and even some that were not yet approved, and I noticed many of them carried this high risk of heart damage. The cardiotoxicity of these drugs impacted the health of so many patients and survivors, and it struck me how common this side effect was.

Separate from this, my co-founder Josh, on his own time, had been developing technology to measure heart signals that you’d normally need an implantable device to capture – his methods made it possible to collect these signals externally. The two of us, along with our third co-founder Andrew, got talking about this overlap and took this nexus to cardio-oncologists, who are the true experts on this issue. Seeing how energized they were about the potential of this measurement to improve outcomes for so many cancer patients made us realize that we were really onto something and led to the genesis of Skribe.

ZK: Can you share more about the product vision for Skribe – what is the core unlock you enable for those undergoing cancer treatment?

RN: The main challenge is that cancer drugs are quite potent and great at killing cancer, but many times the collateral damage in doing so is the heart, and patients are essentially being cured of cancer and then developing heart failure, which is devastating. We designed Skribe to be a wearable patch that detects when cancer drugs are damaging the heart so doctors can intervene and provide heart-saving medications, which are quite effective at preventing long-term damage and oftentimes allow patients to stay the course with their cancer treatment.

We talked to many patients who had worn wearable heart monitors that exist in the market for other purposes, and the overwhelming feedback was that they were bulky, uncomfortable, and the patients couldn’t wait to take them off. Traditional devices therefore wouldn’t work for cancer patients who might need to wear this for 3-12 months, so we set out to redesign a heart monitor from scratch that doesn’t require a battery or antenna and is more like a Band-Aid that you place over the heart. The power and data delivery is completed from a hub device, which is essentially a smartwatch that can be worn on the wrist, which keeps the patch small and light.

ZK: Do you see a shift in the industry in terms of more diagnostics being offered at home versus in facility?

RN: Yes. When you look at the oncology field, patients are already overburdened and going in for checkups, radiation treatment, chemotherapy, and other screenings, so adding additional appointments for things like heart monitoring is a major burden. The drugs they are taking are quite powerful, and patients are tired, so being able to shift heart monitoring to a home setting carries outsized advantage for this patient population. At the same time, sensor technology has accelerated over the past ten years, and we are in the early days of AI-trained algorithms leveraging an abundance of newfound data to complete early detection of heart problems. These trends are now converging and it’s one of the reasons we are so excited to be building in this space today.

ZK: Can you introduce yourself to the community as their North Bay neighbor? Where can we find you when you’re not leading Skribe?

RN: My wife and I moved around quite a bit within the Bay Area while I was completing my PhD, and we would always come up to Marin as our special treat of sorts. We’re both big trail runners and ultramarathoners, so we’d crave running in the Marin Headlands and get up here whenever we could. After I completed my tenure at that cancer drug discovery startup that was based in Utah, we knew we wanted to return to the Bay and picked Marin given its incredible outdoor lifestyle. We now get outside every day, for trail runs and biking, and from the redwood groves to the coast we find it to be the most beautiful place to live.

ZK: What excites you about the potential of the growing Marin + Sonoma startup community and collaborating with MSIV?

RN: I knew about the North Bay’s natural beauty when we moved here, but I had no idea how friendly a community this is. I’ve been shocked – in a good way – around how much a concentration there is here of smart, experienced people in the med tech and biotech spaces, and the willingness of these neighbors to help and create connections for Skribe. Even with our early discussions with MSIV, well before your investment commitment, we benefited greatly from meeting the experts in your local network. Those discussions truly accelerated the progress of our business, and I’m eager to see how the local support structure benefits us over the long-run, and how Skribe can play a role in promoting the growth of the North Bay’s underappreciated startup community.