MD Start, a European medical technology accelerator, announced Thursday that it has raised $11.5 million to create and fund four new French companies that can fulfill unmet needs in the medical device market.
The round was led by French Tech Acceleration Fund managed by Bpifrance, a French public investment bank. Other returning investors were French venture capital firm Sofinnova Partners, Dublin-based Medtronic, and LivaNova, a London-based medical device company.
The money will be invested from MD Start II, and four medical device companies will be incubated and managed by partners at the accelerator.
“MD Start II is not another fund, nor another incubator: MD Start II is the entrepreneur as well as the incubator and the investor,” explained Anne Osdoit, partner at MD Start, in a news release. “We have both a strategic and a day-to-day hands-on approach to transforming innovative ideas into medical realities, in constant dialogue and partnership with the clinician inventors.”
The accelerator was founded in 2009 and it’s first class led four companies to emerge – CorWave, LimFlow, Advanced Perfusion Diagnostics and Magnetic Pacing Technologies. To date, these companies have cumulatively raised nearly $45 million.
Many accelerators in the U.S. typically have a 3-month program period — though for some the time frame is longer — which concludes with a Demo Day. By contrast, MD Start incubates companies for two to three years and takes a more active approach in the daily management of portfolio companies. These responsibilities include business development, product development, market analysis, and clinical and regulatory affairs. Entrepreneurs can also tap into the MD Start partners’ experience in fundraising.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
While MD Start II intends to screen 200 ideas globally focusing on unmet needs, the goal is to whittle down them so as to create and fund four new companies. One big caveat: all four will be based in France.
In the U.S., Zero-to-510(k) is a medtech-only accelerator, somewhat of a rarity given that many other accelerators in the healthcare space have tended to focus on startups that have tech solutions, which can scale quickly and do not need regulatory approval. Medical devices do not readily fit that criterion.
However, recently Texas Medical Center, the largest medical center in the world, which has an accelerator TMCx announced that it would host 11 device startups who would spend 15 weeks in Houston.
Photo: Flickr user Tax Credits
