There’s nothing like a great startup story.
While I don’t recall talking to anyone this year who was so far down in the startup trenches that he didn’t have a home or a reliable source of food, I do remember hearing (and reading) some fascinating stories about entrepreneurship, creative thinking and perseverance this year.
From finding ideas in unexpected places to finding funding in unexpected places and everything in between, here are a few memorable entrepreneur stories from 2013:
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- Scanadu, one of the companies in the running for the Tricorder XPRIZE, broke crowdfunding records when it raised more than $1.6 million through an Indiegogo campaign. Then it raised a $10.5 million round a few months later. Now Scanadu is set to begin trials of the Scout, a consumer device that uses sensors to measure various biometrics, in Q1 of next year.
- In 2010, entrepreneur Steve Malik sold his patient portal company, Medfusion, to Intuit for $91 million. Then, three years later, he decided to buy it back and make a move into the community health space.
- The idea for Genome Liberty, a startup that offers gene-drug interaction testing to consumers, came to its two founders on a cab ride home from oral arguments of the AMP v. Myriad Genetics Supreme Court case this summer.
- Two college roommates who had done volunteer work in developing countries came up with an idea for a text messaging platform to fight counterfeit drugs, and start a conversation between pharma companies and consumers, in developing countries. A few years later, that idea became PharmaSecure, a company that’s raised more than $6 million in funding and launched its services in India last year.
- University of Michigan spinout Atterocor advanced a drug for rare adrenal cancer into the clinic this summer. The drug was co-developed by a former pharmaceutical executive, Raili Kerppola, and her husband after she was diagnosed with the cancer in 2011.
- In search of a way to reduce looping during colonoscopy – a complication that occurs during the insertion phase of the procedure – a gastroenterologist asked her two sons to brainstorm a simple, non-invasive solution. They came up with the ColoWrap, which raised seed funding this year.
- A domino effect led to Savara Pharmaceuticals, a small pharma firm developing a promising drug for cystic fibrosis, collecting a $16 million in Series B entirely from angels and angel groups.
- A healthcare startup, SwipeSense, was a runner-up on WSJ’s Startup of the Year, a 19-week reality TV-style contest for startups. Chicago-based SwipeSense developed a hand sanitizer dispenser that clips onto scrubs to encourage hand hygiene compliance and completed the Healthbox accelerator last year.
