As Flow Medical works to develop its catheter designed to diagnose and treat blood clots, the Chicago startup was named to a prestigious life-sciences accelerator this week.
One of Chicago Inno's startups to watch in 2024, Flow Medical will join 64 other startups from around the world and participate in the latest cohort of Los Angeles-based MedTech Innovator. The company is the only Chicago-based startup to make the cut this year.
Founded by University of Chicago researchers Jonathan Paul and Osman Ahmed, Flow Medical received a $1 million investment last year to help it move to commercialization and step outside the University of Chicago's ecosystem.
CEO Jennifer Fried, an early-stage health care investor and successful startup founder herself, said the world's largest med-tech accelerator will further help the startup reach the next step in its journey.
Fried was brought in to Flow Medical last year as a co-founder and CEO and participated in the MedTech Innovator with her previous venture, Explorer Surgical, a health care startup that designs digital playbooks for surgeons and medical device companies.
"MedTech Innovator is really unique in that this is really the only accelerator in the world that focuses exclusively on med tech," she told Chicago Inno. "It's not just early-stage companies — they also have later-stage companies, but we're very much in that early-stage cohort. When I went through it previously, one of the things I got out of it was that you get assigned specific mentors specific to your subsector, and, two, just being a part of the cohort of other startup founders that are at a similar stage."
Fried said the peer CEOs who became her friends when she did the program the first time were the same people that she called in 2023 when she was evaluating her next career opportunity.
When Chicago Inno spoke with Fried in October up on her arrival at Flow Medical, she said the company was deep in engineering and planned to file with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the second half of 2024. While the startup remains deep in engineering, which Fried said is typical for an early-stage medical device company, it has made a "slight change" to its regulatory strategy.
"I think you will still see us making filings, but the goal would be to file to start to do clinical work sometime next year," she told Chicago Inno.
Now in its 12th year, the four-month MedTech Innovator accelerator looks to identify new medical devices, diagnostic and digital health startups that improve patient care. Approximately 1,300 companies applied to participate in the 2024 accelerator with an acceptance rate of 5%.
"I was definitely disappointed that there weren't more competitors in Chicago, but I think that'll change in the future," Fried said. "The med-tech startup scene in Chicago is developing and expanding."
At the end of the program, cohort companies will compete for $800,000 in non-dilutive funding through audience vote at industry conferences. Since MedTech Innovator launched, more than 600 graduates have received 310 FDA approvals and clearances and have secured $8 billion in follow-on funding.
