LIM Innovations, a California-based healthcare startup that has created an innovative prosthetics socket, aims to close out its first round of funding–$1.5 million–by the end of October. So far the company has raised $450,000 in convertible notes, with more pledged from strategics and undisclosed investors. The company also recently won MedTech Idol, a competition sponsored by WSGR, among others.
Despite the company’s growth, CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Pedtke didn’t intend on entering the healthcare startup sector. At all.
“I fell into it. I never really expected to go into business at all. I was just minding my own business as a surgical resident at UCSF,” he said. He’d been disappointed by the expensive iterative medical device technology, and talking to a surfing buddy in prosthetics, CIO and Co-Founder Garrett Hurley, was excited by potential innovation in that field.
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“If you can put a car on Mars, you can change this industry in the right way,” he said. He compared the current model for producing such as socket to an outmoded craft.
“Think of going to a cobbler to make you a wooden shoe. Over the next month, he whittles you a wooden shoe, and it doesn’t change. It doesn’t accommodate the fact your foot changes size and shape,” he said. It doesn’t have laces, it doesn’t breathe, it’s labor intensive, he added.
LIM, while obviously a play-on-words with “limb,” also stands for “Life is motion” and “Less is more.” Those goals–mobility and simplicity–have driven the innovative product design at the company. Pedtke said four clinical needs grew the development of the sockets:
- “No.1: Amputees need more comfortable sockets.”
- “They need something that they can adjust or gives the user empowerment–meaning they can work with it, change it to accommodate their changing limb shape and size.”
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Moisture management solutions in a combination of materials and design. Toward this end, the startup is at work to make liners that have wicking properties and also a valve expulsion system to remove water.
- “Overall access to the socket needs to be better.”
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That final clinical need is the one LIM arguably is best-equipped to meet. Getting a patient a prosthetics socket that fits takes about a month. LIM is able to get a socket that fits well to a patient in about a day.
The product allows for variability by being adjustable, making the overall fitting quicker. It also allows the patient to adjust for comfort during the day. It works like this: “Roll out a liner, lock it into a socket, adjust the top part, adjust the bottom part and go.”
Future milestones include completing a 10-patient trial for a user-feedback study, which will help cement product design; fill out its IP portfolio; and clear regulatory and pricing matters, Pedtke said. Though the company will roll out its above-knee product first, Pedtke said the company plans on moving to below-the-knee innovation next and finally products for upper extremity amputee patients.
Because it’s a Class-1 FDA device and it’s not particularly expensive to make, Pedtke said the prosthetic knee socket device should see its commercial launch in September 2014.
