Transcript

Clinical outcomes used to be the whole story in Med tech. Now they're just the entry fee. That was the loudest signal coming out of the inaugural Medtech World North America flagship last week. And if you're a founder, it changes how you build, how you raise, and how you exit. Hey everyone, Danny Searing with Floodgate Medical and we just got back from West Palm Beach. And before I get into anything else, hats off to Doctor Dylan Attard and the Medtech World Team for a great three days and for gathering the right people in the right room with real deal flow. I'm already looking forward to next year. Let's start with the capital environment because it's reshaping everything else. Exits are happening later than many founders are pricing in the number that came up across multiple investment. And M&A panels was $40 million in run rate revenue before a strategic will seriously look at acquiring your business, not precommercial or first inhuman 40 million in revenue. The one exception is select cardiac devices. Disruptive cardiology continues to get the earliest exits at the highest valuations, sometimes well before that revenue threshold. Outside of cardiac though, plan for a longer runway. This changes the math on how much you raise when you raise. And what valuation you take, one investor put it pretty bluntly, doesn't matter if you get a $600 million valuation if no one's willing to pay it, that's Monopoly money. The real number is the wire transfer at the end. And it's not just the revenue bar. The criteria for what investors and strategics are pricing continues to shift with clinical efficacy as table stakes. What's getting priced on top of that is reimbursement pathway, workflow integration and health economics. And the hospital get paid for it. Does it fit into how the OR the clinic already operates without adding friction? Does it save the system money on a timeline the payer actually cares about? If you can't answer those three questions, the clinical data alone isn't going to get you to the finish line. Let's talk about a few companies at the conference that seemed to be doing this pretty well. First, Arthro lens machine vision plus machine learning for orthopedic surgery with a dual camera system that delivers real time. Intraoperative guidance without a CT scan and without the capital cost of a full robotic platform. That last part matters. Hospitals are tired of writing 7 figure checks for robots that don't actually get used at scale. Arthur Lens is betting on capital efficiency and workflow fit, which is exactly what ASC's and community hospitals are buying right now. Second, and Speaking of the cardiac exception, is Field Medical, founded by Doctor Steven Mickelson. Who built and exited the first generation pulse field ablation platform. Now sitting inside Boston Scientific, he's back with a second generation PFA system aimed at ventricular tachycardia, which is the harder, more lethal arrhythmia problem. The first wave of PFA didn't solve, they just had first in human 6 month data selected as a late breaking trial. This is what it looks like when a founder reverse engineers the next exit from the limits of the last one. 3rd neo predicts a Swiss German clinical decision support company now expanding into the US and they walked away from West Palm Beach with the Femtech product of the year award. Their pre free product is the first multimodal CE marked prediction model for pre eclampsia risk and their Billy Predix platform predicts neonatal jaundice. Women's and neonatal health was a real focal point of the conference and neo predicts is one of the cleaner. Examples of predictive software with actual clinical validation behind it, not just an AI wrapper. And 4th, a live core. They've been quietly building the most defensible consumer cardiac monitoring footprint in the market with FDA cleared personal ECG and a growing AI later on top of years of accumulated patient data. They're useful case study for younger companies. The Moat isn't the algorithm, it's the data you've spent a decade collecting that nobody else. And replicate big picture. The Med tech capital environment is open, but it's selective and it's later stage. Founders need to build for a longer runway, plan for reimbursement from day one, and treat clinical evidence as the entry fee, not the prize. The companies getting funded and getting bought are the ones that can show real adoption, defensible economics, and a strategic logic for an acquirer that goes beyond. We have good data if you were in West Palm Beach. Drop a comment below on what stood out to you and thanks again to Doctor Dillon and the Medtech World Team for putting on a fantastic event. I'm Danny Airing, thanks for watching.