The nurses at Bellevue Hospital's infectious disease ward didn't have much time to prepare. When measles cases began climbing this winter, the scramble for isolation capacity became urgent—the kind of problem that usually takes weeks of construction permits and contractor bids to solve. Instead, a team wheeled in a transparent cube, plugged it in, and had a functioning negative-pressure chamber running in under a quarter hour.
That cube—manufactured by a startup called Carecubes—is now at the center of a $6.5 million bet that pandemic preparedness has shifted from abstract policy concern to immediate infrastructure need. The company announced its Series A round on March 19, drawing backing from Mark Bertolini, who runs Oscar Health and previously led Aetna, alongside Bill Hawkins, Medtronic's former chief executive. The investor roster reads like a healthcare policy reunion: Henrietta Fore, who ran UNICEF and USAID; Betsy Cohen; and funds including Schooner Capital, Lifeforce Capital, and CQuence Health.
The timing isn't coincidental. As of early March, the CDC had logged 1,281 confirmed measles cases in the U.S. this year—a pace not seen since officials declared the disease eliminated domestically in 2000. Hospitals are responding the way hospitals do when bed capacity gets tight: they're buying equipment. Fast.
The Outbreak That Wouldn't Stop
Measles, for those who've forgotten the pre-vaccine era, spreads through airborne transmission with startling efficiency. A single cough in a closed room can linger infectious for hours. That makes isolation protocols non-negotiable, and it makes isolation rooms—the kind with sealed doors and specialized ventilation that pulls air out rather than circulating it—suddenly scarce.
Carecubes says its portable units are now operating in 36 communities spread across 13 states and territories. Beyond Bellevue, deployments include Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane and Cooper University Health Care in Camden, New Jersey. The company frames this as infrastructure, though the cynic might note that emergency equipment often gets reclassified as infrastructure once the emergency refuses to end.
From Pentagon R&D to Commercial Product
The lineage here matters. Carecubes was founded by Alex Laskey, who previously took the energy-efficiency software company Opower public in 2014, and Saul Griffith, a MacArthur Fellow better known for founding the engineering lab Otherlab. Not the most obvious duo to crack medical device manufacturing, perhaps.
Their path into healthcare started during the 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak, when DARPA funding and a CDC sub-award helped develop what would become the Carecube ISTARI unit. The partnership involved the University of Nebraska Medical Center's Global Center for Health Security—one of the few facilities in the country that regularly treats patients with the most dangerous infectious diseases.
The result received FDA 510(k) clearance in early 2023 under designation K231256 as a Class II negative-pressure patient isolation chamber for bedside use. That distinction is important: most portable isolation tech is designed for transport, moving patients from one place to another. This is meant to stay put, turning any hospital room into an airborne isolation space.
First commercial shipments went out in April 2024 to facilities in Minnesota, New Jersey, Maryland, California, and Colorado—a geographic spread that suggests the company was anticipating broad demand even before this year's measles surge accelerated.
Fifteen Minutes to Containment
The pitch is operational simplicity. According to Carecubes, the ISTARI unit can be assembled and operational in less than 15 minutes, no construction crew required. It meets CDC standards for airborne infection isolation rooms: negative pressure of at least −2.5 pascals, air changes exceeding 15 per hour. The FDA clearance summary notes the device is validated for 24 hours of continuous use per patient and supports interventions like blood draws, IV monitoring, and medication delivery.
Manufacturing happens in Minnesota, with a supply chain extending to North Carolina, Connecticut, California, and Ohio. In January, the company announced an integration with MobileOp4's climate-controlled mobile modules, a move that extends the system's potential use to field hospitals and emergency response scenarios. One can imagine the FEMA applications.
Who's Betting on This
The investor composition tells you something about how pandemic infrastructure gets financed now. Beyond Bertolini and Hawkins, there's Fore, whose UNICEF tenure included managing vaccine distribution across some of the world's most challenging geographies. The advisory board adds Mike Kaufmann, Cardinal Health's former CEO; Andy Stern, who led the Service Employees International Union; and Joseph Grogan, a former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Trump.
It's a roster that spans corporate healthcare, labor, and federal policy—precisely the constituencies that would need to align if portable isolation capacity were to become standard hospital procurement rather than niche emergency spending.
Carecubes hasn't disclosed a post-money valuation or specific deployment targets, which is standard for early-stage medical device plays. The company says the capital will fund scaling in response to infectious disease outbreaks, though "scaling" in this context likely means manufacturing capacity, distribution partnerships, and navigating the procurement cycles of hospital systems that don't typically move fast.
Infrastructure or Emergency Response?
The real question is whether this becomes a category. Measles cases this year are already running ahead of every year since elimination, and the WHO continues to flag outbreak risks globally, particularly as vaccination rates fluctuate. If this turns into a recurring pattern—outbreaks every few years requiring rapid isolation infrastructure—then Carecubes is building something hospitals will keep ordering. If it's a one-time anomaly, the business case gets harder.
The company is clearly betting on the former. So are its investors, some of whom have spent careers thinking about health system resilience. Whether portable isolation chambers join ventilators and IV pumps as standard equipment, or remain a specialized response tool, will depend largely on how the next few outbreak cycles unfold.
For now, the cubes are shipping. And the measles numbers keep climbing.
