Company leader
Connor Landgraf
Co-founder and CEO
Eko Health
Landgraf is trying to make the stethoscope exam digital, so that AI can help any clinician catch heart and lung disease during an ordinary checkup.
A Senior Thesis at UC Berkeley
Connor Landgraf is the co-founder and chief executive of Eko Health, an Emeryville, California, company that makes digital stethoscopes and AI software that flags signs of heart disease during a physical exam.
He started Eko in 2013 while finishing a bioengineering degree at UC Berkeley. His senior thesis asked students to find a real problem in health care and design a solution, and after talking with clinicians he kept coming back to the stethoscope. "It's iconic, used in nearly every exam, but hadn't meaningfully changed in 200 years," he wrote in an origin story on Eko's site. He teamed up with classmates Jason Bellet and Tyler Crouch.
Making the Stethoscope Digital
The three founders learned that clinicians did not want to give up the stethoscopes they trusted, so their first product, the Eko CORE, was an attachment that turned an analog stethoscope into a digital one. It made TIME magazine's list of best inventions. Eko later worked with Littmann on the 3M Littmann CORE Digital Stethoscope and built its own CORE 500.
Eko then built AI on top of the recordings, including FDA-cleared algorithms for structural heart murmurs and for low ejection fraction, the latter developed with Mayo Clinic. Landgraf described the strategy with a consumer comparison when Eko raised a $41 million Series D in 2024: "Just as Ring transformed doorbells into home security systems, Eko has reinvented the world's most ubiquitous medical tool into a powerful early disease detection platform."
750,000 Devices Later
In May 2026 Eko said it had sold 750,000 devices. "When we shipped our first stethoscope, we hoped providers would see what we saw: that digital wasn't just different, it was necessary for better care," Landgraf said in the announcement. In October 2026 Eko launched the CORE 300, priced at $249, which switches between analog and digital listening. "Our goal is to bring the most ubiquitous clinical exam into the precise digital era," he said at the launch.