Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla’s Khosla Ventures LLC put itself on a collision course with Apple Inc. when it moved into the personal health and fitness space a decade ago and invested in AliveCor, a maker of cardiac monitoring devices and software.

Malathi Nayak for Bloomberg News:

What might have been a big partnership opportunity for AliveCor in the years following the release of the Apple Watch in 2015, to offer watch bands that monitor heart health, has turned into a messy court fight.

Now, instead of riding Apple’s coattails as a prominent player in the wearable medical device market, forecast to grow to $132.5 billion by 2031, AliveCor’s Food and Drug Administration-approved technology is inaccessible to the tens of millions of people who buy Apple Watches every year.

The startup is in its third year of trying to prove to judges that the iPhone maker brazenly copied its heart-monitoring technology and sabotaged AliveCor’s ability to offer its own product on the Apple Watch. Apple has parried with claims that its smaller rival’s patent-infringement and antitrust claims are meritless — and with counterattacks alleging that AliveCor is the imitator…

[L]egal experts are skeptical that AliveCor can win its crusade to prove Apple illegally blocked its technology from the Apple Watch, or even collect royalty payments from its adversary.

MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in May 2021:

The fact is that AliveCor sells a bunch of finger-pad devices that cost more, are less convenient, and more likely to get lost versus an Apple Watch that’s strapped to your wrist. AliveCor is losing because their ECG solutions are less elegant, larger, bulkier than simply wearing an Apple Watch Series 4 (released in September 2018) or later with ECG.

Can’t compete? Litigate.

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