No Vital Signs Apparent at Wireless Health Specialist Awarepoint

Awarepoint website June 2018

Awarepoint, the San Diego healthtech startup that specialized in real-time location systems for tracking medical equipment and people in hospitals and clinics, has gone 404.

That’s the error code message that comes up for a website that no longer exists.

Awarepoint executives and board members could not be reached to comment on a recent tip from a former Awarepoint employee, who asked to remain anonymous and who said the company had unexpectedly shut down. A separate tip, sent to me Tuesday by direct message on Twitter from a pseudonym, said the company shut down on May 24. CEO Tim Roche did not respond to a voice message left on his office phone or to an e-mail. Awarepoint’s offices on the second floor of the One America Plaza building in downtown San Diego were locked Wednesday afternoon, and a building representative said the company was gone.

James Adams, a San Diego serial entrepreneur who co-founded Awarepoint with Derek Smith in 2002, said in an e-mail, “I left Awarepoint 10 years ago, and don’t have any insights about what happened since then, unfortunately.”

Awarepoint had raised at least $98 million through 2011 in a combination of venture funding and debt financings. Investors included Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which led a $27 million Series F round in 2011, as well as Venrock, Heritage Healthcare Innovation Fund, New Leaf Venture Partners, Top Tier Capital Partners, Avalon Ventures, and Icon Ventures.

The company had more than 100 employees in 2011, as then-CEO Jay Deady told me at the time.

Awarepoint’s technology combined a ZigBee-based wireless sensor network with radio frequency identity (RFID) tags to track mobile diagnostic equipment, healthcare supplies, and healthcare providers and employees. In addition to tracking equipment and personnel, Awarepoint said its RFID tags helped hospital officials track blood and tissue samples, increase hand hygiene compliance, and help caregivers complete their work more quickly.

Yet even in 2011, then-CEO Deady acknowledged Awarepoint’s market penetration was relatively low at 8 or 9 percent. He attributed that in part to the healthcare market’s slowness in adopting wireless monitoring technologies in general. Whether that remained a factor seven years later is unknown.

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.