MedTech Innovator is an accelerator who cooperates with large companies to invest in, support and scales of healthcare technology companies. Include its partners Johnson & Johnson, the American Heart Association and others. MedTech has graduated more than 700 companies, with 93% of them still in business.
Paul Grand, CEO of Medtech Innovator, spoke with MobiHealthNews About how the accelerator identifies important risks in the commercialization trip of a company and offers expert support to help startups by navigating the market.
MobiHealthNews: What is MedTech Innovator, and how does the emerging technology companies help?
Paul Grand: MedTech Innovator is an accelerator. We like to call ourselves the Graduate School or Accelerators, which means that we are not a place where people show up and say, “Hey, I have an idea to start a company.” That’s not for us. We are looking for companies that at least have prototypes of their technology that work, and they have some proof that those things are actually going to work.
It can be a bankop, it can be a cadaver, it can be human data, it can be animal data, whatever. There is some evidence, what early evidence, that what they do will work.
They actually have a full -time team of at least one person, if not a much larger team, and they have some financing because we are looking for companies that are traveling.
Now, but all too often I think the world forgets startups once they graduated, say, from a university or a accelerator pedal, okay, they are alone. That is not the case. What we focus on are those companies that are now on the path. They have a few resources and we want to ensure that those companies succeed. So that’s our focus.
Think of it as a diagnostics. We look at a company, and we say where they are today until they are on the market and maybe even taken over at the exit, what are all the mistakes or all the risk points they have for them? And we analyze each of these, and then we inform experts to that company to ensure that they do the right thing. So that’s what we do at Medtech Innovator, and it’s a huge amount of work. It is tailored to every company and the results speak for themselves.
MHN: Are you more critical about supporting emerging technology-based companies than other companies that offer more usual or established technology?
Grand: Occasionally we are, and when I say, it’s not just the Medtech Innovator team; we have over 500 people who are involved in evaluating the companies as part of the selection process, and then every one of the companies, as a final step, also has to have one of the large strategic companies in the MedTech industry, companies like Johnson & Johnson or Edwards Lifesciences, Dexcom, Gore, Olympus, Zimmer Biomet, Nipro, all these companies who are specialists in particular areas and who have within their organization kols and other people who really know that space is I am going to investigate these companies.
A really critical thing if you think of emerging technologies is that there can be a new mechanism of action. Think of all things in the interfaces of the brain computer use. The BCI space is really exciting, and there is still much that has not been proven there. We will sit around the room with these experts and they will say, “Look, we have to take on a flyer here.” There will be no evidence that this thing really works for seven years. [We won’t know if] This actually solves a problem, but if this is the case, it will be a game changer.
If you hear these people who, like senior vice-president of the Medtech Division of one of these large companies saying: “Hey, this can be a game changer for all of us”, that’s a huge thing.
I think we all acknowledge that there is never a perfect company you are going, “they have completely eliminated all the risks and everything is perfect.” They still have a risk in them. But especially the emerging technology is a space where I think we are all willing to put a little back and go: “Well, this is what this is all about, making transformational progress”, which you see with emerging technology versus incremental progress.
MHN: It is a high risk/high reward.
Grand: Precisely.
MHN: What advice do you have for companies in the emerging technological space when approaching a accelerator?
Grand: Maybe build what I said, like, really study the need. Where is there a need? People make the mistake of saying, well, what is the fastest path to the market? What is the easiest approval of the regulations? For example, if it is a technology regulated by the FDA, what is the fastest path? Let’s do that, and then we will prove it, and then we will go to where the chance is real. Do not do that one of my biggest advice is, because quickly to the market still costs a lot of money.
Quickly to the market can be three years old or seven years, and if you come to the market, if nobody cares for what it is you do, you will not unlock that next financing round because people say: “Hey, you just spent $ 50 million on a market that nobody cares about.”
So I would say for the big chance – This is where this technology can really make a difference. Let’s develop well. Let’s increase the right amount of capital to do the right strategies for generating evidence to get this thing approved for the big chance. That is what investors want. That is what the market needs. We do not need a product that has been developed for something that will not make a big impact.
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