In the U.S., more than 6,000 new medical devices are approved by the FDA and released every year. As a surgeon, you may not want to stay on top of this, but fear ye not, your helpful neighborhood medical equipment sales team is there to help explain why you need (on average) 16 new toys every day. If it sounds frustrating as a salesperson, well, that’s what AcuityMD is here to resolve; to find opportunities for your sales process.
Since announcing its seed raise in May of 2021, AcuityMD claims that medtech hardware companies have identified more than 40,000 new opportunities using its software, which translates to over $2 billion worth of leads added to the sales pipeline.
“We wanted these big things out of our healthcare system, like value-based healthcare or personalized medicine,” explains AcuityMD’s founder and CEO Mike Monovoukas. “Instead we got 140 instruments in a surgical tray. That’s how much product complexity there is in this space.”
It isn’t immediately clear to me how creating a software platform that helps sales reps make more medical device sales helps the problem of 140 instruments on a surgical tray, but perhaps that’s just me.
The company raised $31 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Venture Partners, with support from Benchmark. The latter led AcuityMD’s $7 million seed round.
“We launched Tactoset in 2019, a key regenerative technology for Anika in a $100 million+ addressable market. While we’ve been able to capture meaningful market share in a short period of time, we wanted to find a tool to help us further unlock the full commercial potential. What we needed was analytics, information and procedural insights — AcuityMD was a game changer,” says Ben Joseph, VP of Commercial and Corporate Development, Anika. “They provided us with a detailed and specific roadmap for prioritizing our selling efforts, including a plan targeting over 500 surgeons across various clinical call points, which resulted in a robust target pipeline. While we started using AcuityMD with one product line, we’ve now expanded our engagement to include our full joint preservation portfolio.”
“[Our customers are] trying to sell and educate surgeons about which products to use in which settings. It is a very white-glove sort of hands-on sale, and they’re really good at educating and training surgeons on the latest technologies for their procedures. That’s the salesperson’s job, and they should be spending all their time helping in the field, helping surgeons learn about new technologies and get them trained and comfortable using those new technologies. Instead, because of the current landscape of software systems that the sales reps rely on, they spend their days in their office logging notes into a CRM,” explains Monovoukas, highlighting the company’s value proposition. “We’re taking valuable time where a sales rep could be educating a surgeon about a new robot that they can use.”
With this company, Monovoukas, is scratching his own itch — he started his career as a medical device entrepreneur; his first foray into entrepreneurship. He learned quickly how hard it was to commercialize a new product in a highly regulated market.
“What if it was much easier to get new technology and products out to market? Could we unleash the power of innovation to help these smaller companies that have really innovative technologies get those products out to market quicker, faster and get feedback, so they can innovate and continue to produce?,” asks Monovoukas, describing the initial germ of the idea for AcuityMD. “Instead, what ends up happening is the only path that a small company has to get their products to market is to go and get acquired by a big incumbent enterprise. There’s a disconnect between innovation — which is really important for the U.S. healthcare space and globally — medical technology, innovation and how the products are actually commercialized. We’re trying to make it a lot easier for those innovative technologies to get out to market faster.”
“The medical device industry is worth nearly a half a trillion dollars, and yet somehow there is no intelligent, simple and modern tool to handle go-to-market components of the business,” explains Logan Bartlett, managing director, Redpoint Ventures, highlighting how AcuityMD was successful in raising its $31 million Series A. “AcuityMD is tackling this massive piece of the healthcare industry with a new kind of software that is already helping leaders in the space streamline sales and grow their businesses, which is why we’re thrilled to invest in the groundbreaking business and team.”