A number of teams, most from out of the area, are sending players to Dana Point this week to talk medtech.
The roster ranges from San Francisco-based ZKR Orthopedics to acoustic cardiac disease monitoring company Acarix, in Malmö, Sweden. Representatives of medtech companies in Boston, Northern California and Europe are scheduled to attend.
“We’ve got a hundred startups [seeking] $2.5 billion in capital,” Scott Pantel, CEO of Life Science Intelligence Inc., told the Business Journal.
CEOs who scheduled to speak have had more than 200 “exits” worth more than $100 billion, he said.
Huntington Beach-based LSI is a medtech market research and consultant that’s producing the event.
“We did meetings years ago, but this is our coming out party,” Pantel said.
Some 20 sponsors back the show. Those with an OC presence include powerhouse law firms Knobbe Martens for intellectual property and Stradling for life sciences; medical and technology accelerator Octane; and BioQuest, a San Francisco-based life sciences executive search firm with an office in Mission Viejo.
At least eight companies attending are from OC: Stroma Medical, NuEyes, Cerenetex, and MediPines, all of Newport Beach; ClearFlow, in Anaheim; CathWorks, in Aliso Viejo; and Diality and Modulim, in Irvine.
Modulim’s an example of what could come next for a company that gets funding. It has about 10,000 square feet of lab and office space for its product, Clarifi, for noninvasive microvascular assessment.
The product commercialized late last year after $11 million in National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense grants, and $10 million in venture capital from investors including Pangaea, Fresenius, Mitsubishi, Hamamatsu, Grey Sky and Cove Fund I.
CEOs from two of the nine firms will speak at the conference, along with Octane’s Bill Carpou (see main story).
“It’s critical to support opportunities that bring investors and entrepreneurs together,” Carpou said. “OC has the innovation to attract investors and investors have an appetite for our companies.”
