At the RespirAI Launch Party in spring 2026 at their new home in the Catalyst Building.

Front row from left to right:

Back row from left to right:

The Pause 

For the second question, I asked Nimrod to picture his younger self—an analyst in his first year at Teva, the Israeli generic-drug giant—and imagine explaining that he’d one day be in Omaha, Nebraska, supervising a clinical study for a technology licensed from another country, running trials on two continents. 

He laughed a little at the geography. “I never thought I’d find myself in Nebraska,” he admitted. “Ninety two percent humidity?” But the arc itself would not have surprised the younger man. “I always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” he said. “I built myself to be a CEO. I tried to collect different types of expertise.” 

It helped that he came wired for the work. “I have a quite unique background—degrees in both biology and economy,” he said, which slotted him neatly into business-development roles that wanted a scientific mind. At the start, Nimrod said he thought pharmaceuticals were the entire world; it took an MBA, sitting among people from other industries, to see how much else was out there. So he made a practice of the discovery. “I decided to have a virtual pause every few years,” he explained. “To open the spectrum, to look for my opportunities, to build myself to the next phase.” New position, new technology, roughly every two or three years, inside Teva and out. 

Teva, he says, was an amazing school. He started in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) and, by 26, was flying around APAC, the US, and Europe on his own, working with manufacturing sites in the US, China, the Netherlands, and Israel. Working out of a small home market, he said he learned early to look outward. “You need to think global,” he said, “and this is what I did from day one.” Looking back, he said he wouldn’t change the route. “If I’m looking at my career now, I would do this exact same pathway.” His younger self, he figures, would read RespirAI and Omaha as graduation. The plan worked. 

Which raises a tension worth sitting with in 2026. Nimrod spent his career watching the global economy unfurl and grow; lately the tide has turned toward regions and borders. His answer is a paradox he repeats like a mantra: “Although we like playing like a global company, we’re still very, very local.” RespirAI has R&D in Israel and a headquarters in the US, but every effort right now points at a single market—the US—chosen precisely because it’s unified. “One reimbursement system, one regulatory system, one language,” he ticked off. Europe would be more global, and more complicated. Germany, the UK, China, even Israel—each an opportunity the company has deliberately held. “We are still in the proof-of-concept stage,” he said. “We still need to prove to everyone that there is a value behind the technology, there is a market behind the technology, and that people can adopt it.” 

The Convergence 

What’s next runs on two tracks at once. 

The first is regulated. RespirAI’s lead products are built for early detection—flagging a COPD exacerbation, or a pneumothorax, before it becomes an emergency. Two pilot studies are underway in Nebraska with Methodist Health, with Mayo Clinic and other US sites in the wings. One product line targets hospitalizations; the other, admission rates. Nimrod said he expects both pilots to wrap by the end of this year or the start of next. 

The second track is the platform itself—unregulated and already live. “We develop a holistic solution for the chronic respiratory patient,” Nimrod said. The mobile app, launched a few months ago, works from both sides: patients monitor their own condition and share it with caregivers and clinicians, while a dashboard lets clinicians see how those patients are doing at home. No alerts yet—those come later—but even without them, he said he believes today’s Medicare remote-monitoring codes (RPM and RTM) can support it. “It’s like a one-stop shop for the COPD patient on a daily basis,” he said—and, he added, currently the only real window a clinician has into that patient between visits. 

The two tracks are built to converge. By the end of 2027, when the regulated products are ready, RespirAI plans to fold those cleared features into the platform it’s assembling now—clinics, home-care infrastructure, reimbursement, patients, all of it. Until then, deliberately low-profile. “We’re not going to generate a million dollars,” he said. The point is to prove the whole flow works and can be paid for. 

The stakes underneath it are stark. According to the World Health Organization, COPD is the third leading cause of death globally. According to the Centers for Disease Control, it is the fourth leading cause of hospitalization in the US. There are ways to treat it, but patients live with flare-ups no one sees coming.  

Nimrod’s whole thesis fits in one sentence he’s clearly said many times: “If we could provide an alert a few days before hospitalization, the clinicians can step in earlier, and by providing antibiotics or steroids we can reduce the severity of the flare-up dramatically and keep these patients at home.” And beneath the hospitalizations and the burden, the number that matters most. “Most importantly,” he said, “is to save these patients’ lives.” 

And COPD is only the first indication. “We’re talking about asthma. We’re talking about CF (cystic fibrosis), maybe a cardiac solution, maybe post-hospitalization, collaboration with pharmaceutical companies, even some wellness applications,” he said.  

Then, Nimroad said, the algorithm will “expand to other indications, other territories—and sky’s the limit.” The entrepreneur who once thought pharma was the whole world is, these days, very disciplined about staying focused: one market, one disease, one thing to prove first. 

RespirAI is a very personal project for me — your neutral and detached host. When the invention first crossed my desk over a decade ago, I knew it was something special. The success of the project is a matter of enormous personal pride. Although in retrospect it was obvious, it was only in our studio set did I realize how personal it was for Nimrod, too. The technology, yes, he is passionate about bringing new solutions to manage a disease that truly is a global scourge. In a summer when the world feels fractious, I am so grateful to have this story to tell.  

And that’s our show! A huge thank-you to Nimrod and Asaf; to Jonell Tempero; to William Denton, Amol Patil, Stephen Rennard, Nik Stergiou, and Jennifer Yentes; to the teams at Nebraska Methodist, Mayo Clinic, and Right at Home; and of course, to the UNeTech Institute and UNeMed Corporation for helping this technology find its way from a patent portfolio toward a patient’s home. Watch this space for more Start-Up Updates!