Rune Labs Is Transforming Parkinson’s Care With Your Apple Watch

Each year, millions of people slip into the slow spiral of Parkinson’s disease, often beginning with something innocuous like a slight tremor or unsteady gait. Diagnosis comes late, care comes later, and subsequent treatment is often based more on guesswork than grounded data. In the meantime, the disease quietly chips away at the patient’s movement, mood, memory, and dignity. It’s a clinical blind spot that grows more costly, financially and humanly, with every passing year.

Rune Labs, a San Francisco-based startup, is trying to fix that. Not by trying to connect the brain to a computer or implant lab-grown neurons. Instead, they’re betting on something far more pragmatic, using popular consumer devices like the Apple Watch to build a continuously updating, high-resolution picture of how neurological disease actually unfolds. Their platform, StrivePD, turns passive data into clinical signal, aiming to shift Parkinson’s care, with the Apple Watch, from episodic and reactive to continuous and precise.

Closing the Gap Between Symptoms and Care

Parkinson’s disease rarely announces itself with urgency. It slowly creeps in and can easily be misread or dismissed in a primary care setting. By the time patients reach a neurologist, years may have passed and the condition has typically progressed to include a complex interplay of motor symptoms, cognitive changes, and autonomic dysfunction. But even then, clinical decisions are made with only fragmentary information: a short appointment, a few subjective reports, and no real visibility into the day-to-day experience of the disease.

This is a fundamental failure of measurement and characteristic of the challenges in treating disorders of the brain. Parkinson’s symptoms fluctuate not just over weeks, but hour to hour. Yet our clinical tools are static, episodic, and frankly somewhat subjective. There’s no continuous, objective window into how someone is really doing. This makes everything from tailoring medication to programming deep brain stimulation (DBS) systems a process of trial and error, constrained by the absence of real-world data.

Rune Labs is changing that. Their platform, StrivePD, brings together passive monitoring from the Apple Watch, patient-reported outcomes, and device-level data from DBS systems to construct a longitudinal view of each individual’s disease trajectory. The goal isn’t just to supplement clinical visits but to transform how we track disease itself. By grounding Parkinson’s care in real-time, multimodal data, StrivePD moves neurology closer to the precision care that’s long been promised but rarely delivered.

StrivePD can collect a great wealth of data directly from the Apple Watch.

Transforming Parkinson’s Care with an Apple Watch

At the heart of Rune Labs’ product is the StrivePD platform and app. Using an FDA-cleared Apple Watch API, StrivePD passively tracks tremor and dyskinesia throughout the day. iPhone sensors add another layer of data integration, capturing gait, mobility, and activity patterns. Patients can also log their medications, sleep, mood, and symptom fluctuations. 

Since receiving FDA clearance in 2022, StrivePD has matured from a tracker into a clinical decision support tool. In 2024, Rune Labs launched StrivePD-AI, which uses generative AI to synthesize monthly clinical summaries with interpretable trends, treatment insights, and patient-specific reports. Alongside it came StrivePD Guardian, a human-in-the-loop coaching service that adds behavioral support, exercise nudges, and personalized alerts. 

Rune Labs sends exercise nudges to improve the care of Parkinson's patients.

The company’s ambitions reach far beyond Parkinson’s. Rune Labs is now building toward a broader vision of precision neurology, extending its infrastructure to support conditions like multiple sclerosis, essential tremor, and OCD. If they succeed, StrivePD won’t just be a Parkinson’s app but form the backbone of a new kind of neurological care. Real-time, patient-centered, and grounded in continuous data rather than episodic assumptions.

The Team and Capital Behind Rune

Rune Labs was founded in 2019 by Brian Pepin (CEO) and Miro Kotzev, drawing on Pepin’s background in neural engineering at UC Berkeley and his work at Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences arm. At Verily, he helped build data platforms for oncology and diabetes. These efforts revealed a gap in neurology: a lack of infrastructure to turn raw clinical and sensor data into actionable insights. Rune Labs was created to fill that void.

The company raised a $5 million seed round in 2020 to build its foundational infrastructure, followed by a $22.8 million Series A in 2021. An additional $12 million came in 2024 to support clinical deployment and expand the platform’s AI capabilities. Now in the process of raising another $14 million, Rune Labs is growing quickly, scaling its engineering team and broadening its focus beyond Parkinson’s. A dedicated team is already in place to extend the platform to multiple sclerosis, with other neurological indications on the horizon.

If they succeed, StrivePD won’t just be a Parkinson’s app. It’ll be the backbone of a new kind of neurological care.

Looking ahead, the company is prioritizing the expansion of StrivePD Guardian across health systems, building on early outcomes that suggest meaningful reductions in emergency visits and improved patient engagement. Continued investment in generative AI will deepen the platform’s ability to deliver personalized insights, while growing partnerships with payers and providers will be key to achieving broader reimbursement.

Why it matters

From a business standpoint, Rune Labs shows how precision digital health can meet a clearly defined clinical need. By capturing real-world data through familiar consumer devices and translating it into clinical utility, Rune Labs opens multiple revenue pathways; from partnerships with health systems to enabling decentralized trials for pharmaceutical companies. With an aging population and clinician shortages, the market is primed for platforms that can utilise existing technology to produce both outcomes and efficiency.

From a neuroscience perspective, Rune Labs is enabling longitudinal data collection at scale. This is providing opportunities to study disease progression, treatment response, and phenotypic variability in ways that were previously inaccessible. Its work with the Parkinson’s Foundation to integrate digital biomarkers with genetic data signals a shift toward individualized, data-rich approaches to diagnosis and intervention. Rune Labs is doing its part in helping move neuroscience from a reactive discipline to a predictive one.

Conclusion

While much of digital health chases the next breakthrough in diagnostics or device design, Rune Labs is taking a less convoluted approach to improving care. Their product isn’t flashy; it’s disciplined, data-driven, and deeply rooted in clinical reality. By turning everyday wearables into tools for continuous brain monitoring, they’re making precision neurology both possible and practical. And if they succeed, they might help redefine how we measure, treat, and ultimately understand the human brain and its many diseases.