Over the last 15 years, many medical device companies have struggled to meet their annual growth expectations. Although Fortune 500 MedTech companies have large R&D teams with lots of resources, their projects tend to take arduous timelines from concept to clearance.
As a result, larger companies are seemingly relying upon startups to augment their R&D development to achieve growth strategies. You might ask Why is this? Or how can this be? Both are fair questions.
Startup companies are led by entrepreneurs who have a tendency and culture to innovate, problem-solve, and operate at a much faster pace of play because their start-up playbook depends upon a continual flow of investment capital, and milestone achievement, which requires the flywheel-turning everyday mission-critical and quarterly execution paramount.
Most medical device companies now set aside millions of dollars in their annual budgets to invest with the intention of acquiring innovative startups to drive their growth plans. Acquisitions in some organizations, function as external R&D teams to innovate and iterate devices for expansion into large markets such as coronary artery disease (CAD), peripheral artery disease (PAD), structural heart, heart failure, and renal denervation.
The genesis of Keystone Venture Cap is to harness the clinical knowledge and decades of startup expertise in the interventional and surgical sectors to identify innovative companies in need of capital, understand the barriers to entry, assess the substantial clinical and nonclinical unmet needs and identify investment opportunities like several of our prior investments that have concluded with an IPO or M&A conclusion.
