Companion Medical Raises $3M to Get Its Smart Insulin Pen to Market

Companion Medical, a San Diego medical device startup founded about 16 months ago, has raised $3 million in an ongoing Series B financing round led by an investment from Eli Lilly, according to a statement from the company yesterday.

“We will use the capital to attempt to achieve FDA clearance of our device as well as other development,” CEO Sean Saint wrote in response to a query from Xconomy.

Companion Medical has been developing an insulin injector pen that uses a Bluetooth link to connect to the patient’s smartphone. The injector pen sends data about the amount of insulin injected and time of use to a mobile app, and includes such features as a dose calculator and missed dose alarms. “The FDA has not yet cleared a Bluetooth pen (to our knowledge); we hope to be the first,” the CEO added.

Saint  declined to say how much capital Companion Medical had raised previously. Before founding the company, Saint was director of mechanical engineering and advanced technology at San Diego-based Tandem Diabetes Care (NASDAQ: [[ticker:TNDM]]), and worked before that at Santa Rosa, CA-based Alure Medical and San Diego’s Dexcom (NASDAQ: [[ticker:DXCM]]).

New Companion MedicalLOGOCompanion Medical said in April, 2014, that it had received an undisclosed investment from the Swedish medical research company Diamyd Medical. In September, Saint walked away with an award for content that included prizes worth $5,000, based on a presentation he gave at the San Diego Tech Coast Angel’s 2014 quick-pitch competition.

In its statement, the company says Lilly’s investment, along with funding from other investors, could enable Companion to complete testing and seek a 510(k) clearance for its medical device and related smartphone app.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.