ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Inventor Bob Rosenbluth has founded, alongside lifelong friends and co-founders, five medtech companies, each more successful than the last. The latest, Inari Medical, was notably the best IPO in 2020, even though it began its roadshow just as the pandemic hit. MedTech Strategist spoke with Rosenbluth to distill lessons from his successes.
Over the decades that the MedTech Strategist team has been writing about the medical device industry, we have, on occasion, asked, “Is the medical device model for innovation dead?” There have been cycles in the industry during which early-stage companies have struggled for lack of venture capital funding, and it’s easy to see why. At the seed stage, it is difficult to predict winners since it takes so many years for a medical product to reach the market, and it’s a risky prospect, given the many hurdles companies must surmount—stringent regulation, unclear reimbursement, physician buy-in, and the pressure to gain significant commercial traction before an exit materializes. There is one person, however, who knows that the model is very much alive and always has been.
