Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: medtech

Which Minnesota Accelerator Has Graduated 18 Healthcare Startups in the Last Year?

February 10, 2019 / / 0 Comments

If you know how startup accelerator programs work, 18 is a seriously impressive number to achieve in 12 months. Having a program that can put that many startups, that quickly, through a rigorous process, enabling them to launch effectively out into the world, deserves some major praise. And I’m about to give it to them.

Hats off to gBETA MedTech! And especially to the program manager who runs it, Adam Choe. Adam is the man! If you’re not familiar with this program (a part of gener8tor Minnesota), it’s a free, seven-week accelerator that works with medical device, healthcare-gBETA MedTech logorelated software, biotech, and diagnostics startups. In 2018, it successfully ran three — count ’em, three! — cohorts of six startups each. So, yes, it prepared a total of 18 healthcare-related startups, from Minnesota and beyond, to go out and raise money, continue their product development, build out their teams, and start hitting their milestones. And it did all that very, very well.

I can say that because, as a gener8tor mentor since 2016, I was involved throughout. I have met and heard the pitches of every single one of those 18 startups — at least twice, actually. The highlight is always the final pitch of these startups at the demo night for each cohort, called “LiveBeta,” an event attended by at least a few hundred folks here in the Twin Cities (a large percentage of which are investors). That is where these founders shine! And you can really see the progress they’ve made during the seven-week program.

Scene at LiveBeta demo event on January 16, 2019

Hundreds gathered at the JJ Hill Center in St. Paul to hear the Fall 2018 gBeta MedTech class give their pitches.

I have never ceased to be impressed when I attend these demo nights that gener8tor and gBETA put on (and I’ve attended each and every one since gener8tor came to Minnesota in 2016). These founders get on stage and deliver amazing, very well prepared pitches that really focus great attention on the problem they’re solving and the attendant market opportunity. (And they each must have a total addressable market of hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, to participate in the program.)

Logos of the 18 gBETA MedTech startups in 2018

The 18 startups that completed the gBETA MedTech program in calendar year 2018.

You can bet you’ll be hearing more about many of these startups going forward. Remember these 18 names! You can click through and read more about them on gBETA MedTech’s site here.

And what’s more impressive than 18? Well, try 23. That’s actually the total number of startups that gener8tor graduated here in Minnesota during 2018 when you count the five that went through its main equity program during the summer.  (One of which is healthcare.) Congratulations to those startups as well: Cellular EMT, FaithBox, Onepanel, SpeechMed, and Virtue Analytics. I wrote about that cohort here.

—–

P.S.  I should also mention here that the very first gBETA startup I mentored, which was part of the first class in Minnesota in late 2016, happened to be healthcare related — and it went on to be acquired just two short years later: CoreBiome. Congrats to them!

What’s the Future for MedTech Startups? Reasons to Be Worried (and a Ray of Hope)

October 17, 2016 / / 0 Comments

[NOTE: This post first appeared at Minnov8.com. My friends at Rochester Rising in southern MN also ran a version of it later.]

Living and working here in Minnesota, as I do, you constantly hear about how wonderful our state’s medical technology industry is. After all, we’re the No. 1 Global Medtech Cluster, as I was reminded again here at the AdvaMed 2016 conference.  We all think we’re sitting on this huge industry that will just keep growing forever and bring bountiful riches to our state. Well, it turns out things are not all that rosy.futureatrisk-cover280w

I learned today about a new report, “A Future at Risk: Economic Performance, Entrepreneurship, and Venture Capital in the U.S. Medical Technology Sector.”

Here’s the gist:

“The American medical technology industry has been suffering from a steady decline of entrepreneurship for more than two decades…”

What? Yes, it’s a fact: the numbers associated with this engine of innovation (and jobs) have been declining quite markedly.

We can relate to the medtech startup engine very well here in Minnesota, with our own giant Medtronic having been started by Earl Bakken in a garage in Northeast Minneapolis. (I worked for the company early in my career and got to be taken out for a welcome lunch by the man himself.)

Two charts from the report, shown here, will surprise many. (Click for larger view.) startupdensity-chart-kauffman

newcoformations-chartHere’s more from the report’s executive summary:

“The (medtech) industry is increasingly concentrated in a shrinking number of large players. All of those companies are scouring the globe for medtech innovation. With fewer startups in the system, the industry’s dominant companies recognize the long-term threat to innovation represented by fewer companies fueling the industry’s pipeline of innovation. All these factors represent a present and future threat to American leadership in the industry, to medical innovation and, ultimately, to patients.” Continue reading

© 2024 Graeme Thickins on Tech

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑