Series A round of $3.7 million a year ago with private investors and small institutions. He estimates that the company will need to raise another $2 million to $4 million.
The company is targeting potential customers in both civilian and military medical institutions in the United States and abroad. So far, it has sold devices to the City of Memphis’ fire department, which oversees its ambulance service, Memphis’ medical flight service, and Hermann Memorial Hospital in Houston, which runs one of the busiest trauma centers in the world. “Suturing as a skill is restricted to doctors, and it takes them several minutes,” Filips says. “We knew our device had to be simple to use.”
As they bootstrapped the company, he and Atkinson spent a couple of years trying to design the device, working with a local sheet metal shop to come up with the original prototype and finishing it off with the help of University of Alberta consultants. “It took about 30 different prototypes to perfect it,” he says.
For his part, Faris learned about iTraumaCare through a chance meeting at an entrepreneur bootcamp where he was a panelist two years ago. Faris had been CEO of Vidacare, a San Antonio medtech device company that manufactures a driver-and-needle system to access spaces inside bones for diagnostic and therapeutic treatments in vascular and emergency medicine, as well as in cancer treatment. (Last month, Teleflex (NYSE: TFX) bought Vidacare for $262.5 million.)
“The markets that their innovation targeted are the same ones that we had approached with Vidacare and we had built a successful organization and company,” Faris says. “We talked for a year and they had made progress, had a prototype, and we struck up a formal relationship at that point.”
The men decided that the South Texas town would be the ideal location for its U.S. headquarters. Home to the U.S. Army’s Fort Sam Houston, as well as the U.S. Air Force’s Lackland and Randolph bases, San Antonio has a critical mass of trauma expertise. The University of Texas at San Antonio Health Science Center’s medical school is also located there.
iTraumaCare’s ties to San Antonio’s medical community grew closer this month when Catherine Burzik, the former CEO of Kinetic Concepts, a local medtech company specializing in wound care and regenerative medicine, joined its board. (KCI was taken private in 2011 by Apax Partners for $6.3 billion.)
Filips remains based in Edmonton, though, in reality, he seems to live on airplanes. In the next week, he will travel to Europe, Saudi Arabia, and the East Coast, marketing the iTClamp. Still, he hopes to get to the point where he can be in Texas once a month.
“There is so much trauma expertise there,” Filips says. “That was critical.”
