Our Investment in Kascaid

Clinical Trials Need Denser Data

Clinical trial dropout rates average around 30%, and have been reported as high as 40% in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) trials, often driven by the burden of frequent testing. Dropouts are not just operational friction, they’re million dollar setbacks. The combined cost of replacing a dropped-out patient, amending protocols, and delaying enrollment timelines can easily exceed $500K per participant.

Meanwhile, in autoimmune trials and disease care, biomarker data is usually collected via sparse blood draws. But flares last just a few days, meaning they can be missed and pharmacodynamic insights delayed, leaving trial sponsors and clinicians flying blind.

Remote tools for frequent or continuous measurements have already transformed cardiometabolic monitoring. Inflammation is next, but the infrastructure doesn’t exist yet.

An Experienced Team With a Key Insight

The founding team at Kascaid came together after years of working in diagnostics R&D at Freenome and PrognomiQ. Kavya, the CEO, had led multi-omics biomarker discovery programs. Scott, the CSO, had developed extracellular vesicle assays and scaled pre-analytical workflows for early detection. Austin, the CPO, has been obsessed with ensuring sample integrity to deliver high fidelity immune profiling across academic and translational settings.

In that work, they frequently encountered immune signal degradation and background noise in blood samples. They started sketching ideas after hours, driven by the conviction that interstitial fluid (ISF) could be a cleaner, underused matrix for capturing these biomarkers. What began as a frustration with pre-analytics turned into a shared insight: if you could track immune activity the way other biomarkers are continuously tracked today in the ISF, you could open up a new class of real-world immune measurements.

From the start, it was clear this team had something special: technical depth, a unique insight, and rare founder chemistry. They’re mission-driven, gritty, and moving with urgency.

Capturing Real-Time Patient Data

Kascaid’s first product is a research-use-only patch that combines microneedle sampling with lateral flow detection to measure canonical inflammatory biomarkers. It is single-use, semi-quantitative, and readable via smartphone. The goal is to give sponsors a denser, minimally invasive dataset on flare dynamics during clinical trials.

They’re intentionally starting in RA to derisk technically and commercially. Immunology accounts for a meaningful share of early-stage clinical trials, and these studies are often constrained by poor data coverage and patient dropout. The biomarkers they’re targeting also overlap with other inflammatory conditions, enabling rapid expansion into adjacent indications.

Longer term, the team plans to migrate into autoimmune disease management, which currently lacks tools for frequent disease monitoring between visits. They describe a future where real-time immune data, passively collected at home, informs treatment decisions and health optimization, similar to how continuous glucose monitoring transformed and decentralized care.

Our Thesis on Molecular Biosensors

We see Kascaid becoming a foundational measurement and data infrastructure company for immune-mediated disease. Their platform could generate a novel category of longitudinal, high-frequency inflammatory biomarker data that currently doesn’t exist.

At 2048 Ventures, we believe longitudinal, high-frequency patient data can power both diagnostics and therapeutics. What we’re most excited about is not the device, but the data exhaust it can produce. This also aligns with our broader Thesis on Sensors: low-cost hardware generating proprietary, real-time data will underpin the next wave of infrastructure, and this is also true in healthcare.

We’re proud to co-lead this $2.3M pre-seed round with Boost VC and to be joined by Ensemble, Draper Associates and Spacecadet. We are grateful to Enrique Lin Shiao for introducing us to this fantastic team.

Learn more about Kascaid by following Kavya, Scott and Austin on LinkedIn.