will complement its devices and show up on the screens it has sold to hospitals up to this point. In July, the FDA cleared the company’s new software for sale. Sullivan says that customers should be able to start using it later this year. He says any existing client will be able to license it, but must pay to do so.
“The software represents a new product that the customer can choose to purchase and add on to their existing system, at their option,” he says.
By this point, selling companies off to larger acquirers is becoming old hat for Sullivan, who joined NeuWave as CEO in 2014. He was previously president and CEO at SuperDimension, which in 2012 was sold for $300 million to Covidien, now part of Medtronic (NYSE: [[ticker:MDT]]). Prior to that, he was an executive at Scimed Life Systems, which Boston Scientific (NYSE: [[ticker:BSX]]) bought in 1995 for $865 million.
“All deals are different,” he says when asked to compare the latest deal to others in his career. “This one just has the opportunity to be really exciting, with the emerging technology that NeuWave has.”
That reaction sounds a bit ho-hum, at least compared with how advocates for life science businesses in Wisconsin took the news.
“This is exactly what we want to see,” says Lisa Johnson, who leads BioForward, an industry trade association based in Madison. “It shows that companies are looking here for value and innovation.”
Earlier this year, Johnson moderated a panel that offered an opportunity to look at a selection of biotechs in the state that were acquired in the last five years.
