How This Founder Turned a Lifetime of Food Allergies Into a Lifesaving Startup

Alerje founder Javier Evelyn’s mobile auto-injector platform was recently acquired by Sempresto.

EXPERT OPINION BY ELISA MILLER-OUT, MANAGING PARTNER, CHLOE CAPITAL

Alerje founder Javier Evelyn. Illustration: Inc.; Photos: Courtesy company

When he was five years old, his mother thought he was just being picky. Growing up in a Panamanian Afro-Latino household outside of Chicago in the 1980’s, refusing food was considered wasteful. So when Javier Evelyn stopped eating the fish she served one night, at first it seemed like stubbornness. It wasn’t. A trip to the ER revealed a serious allergy. Over time, more followed: any finned fish, pistachios, cashews, and later, casein—the milk protein found in cheese and dairy. Javier even developed new allergies as an adult, defying conventional wisdom. “Typically, you outgrow food allergies,” he says. “I picked up two more.”

Despite a lifetime of severe reactions, Evelyn rarely carried his EpiPen. His mother was a nurse and he came from a family of healthcare professionals. His wife reminded him constantly. But the device felt bulky, inconvenient—easy to leave behind. “If I, someone who deeply understood the risks, still struggled to carry an epinephrine injector consistently,” he says, “then millions of others were likely doing the same.”

That lived experience became the foundation for Alerje, a Michigan-based health tech company founded in 2016 that’s rethinking how patients carry and use epinephrine (and a portfolio company of my venture capital firm, Chloe Capital). Evelyn’s idea: Combine the most ubiquitous object in modern life—the smartphone—with a redesigned, patient-centered epinephrine device. People already carry their phones everywhere. What if their life-saving medication could travel along?

He began studying familiar form factors: wallet phone cases, battery packs snapped onto the back of devices. “If we built something to save your phone’s life every day,” he says, “why not build something to save your own?”

How Anthropic's Claude AI Became a Co-Founder

The insight was simple. The execution was not.

Drug delivery is one of the most complex categories in medtech. Intellectual property claims are everywhere, and for years the dominant auto-injector design was heavily protected.

“You’re walking into a minefield of IP,” Evelyn says.

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