Phoenix Children’s has entered a new partnership to help develop and spin out some of its ideas into independent companies by working with Coplex, a venture studio based in Phoenix.
Coplex will work with Phoenix Children's to create six startups over the next three years, according to an announcement shared exclusively with AZ Inno. Phoenix Children's and Coplex will take equity stakes in the startups and fund them as they get off the ground, but each will be set up as a standalone company outside the hospital system.
Phoenix Children's is one of the largest pediatric health systems in the nation, with more than 1,150 primary care providers and specialists spread across clinics, surgery centers and hospitals all over the Valley.
Massive health systems face unique challenges and Phoenix Children's staff have thought of unique ways to deal with them, some of which might be worth commercializing for other hospitals.
“Partnering with Coplex will enable us to leverage the innovations that we create in-house to impact our own patients, and share those with the health care community at large, which could impact thousands of more lives every day,” David Higginson, chief innovation officer at Phoenix Children’s, said in a statement.
Eli Chmouni, venture director at Coplex, said Phoenix Children's staff have developed lots of interesting processes and solutions, but it did not have a system to help these ideas grow.
“Over the past year, Coplex has been evaluating and working with PCH (Phoenix Children's Hospital) to do market research and competitive analysis on some of these ideas, to rank them, to really create the methodology and the system to help PCH process those ideas,” he told AZ Inno.
Coplex will support startups in early stages of growth
Though the agreement is to spin out six companies, Chmouni said they only have one or two concrete ideas right now. The remaining ideas will come from the new idea-processing infrastructure Coplex helped develop, so Phoenix Children's will be better equipped to foster innovations that bubble up from its workforce going forward.
And though Phoenix Children's is a hospital system, these startups will not necessarily be medical in nature. Chmouni said one of the early ideas they are working on (in stealth mode) has to do with intrahospital communications and sharing urgent information efficiently.
Phoenix Children's and Coplex will support these startups until they get to a stage where they can grow on their own and they are ready to raise seed or series A money.
Unlike startup incubators or accelerators that work with individual founders, Coplex’s venture studio model is designed to help large corporations take internal processes and build them up into stand-alone companies. Coplex also helps recruit experienced operators to lead these startups.
Coplex works with seasoned Valley entrepreneurs such as Jim Prendergast, Tim Crown and Chmouni who has previously founded several startups, most recently a digital signage company called Neon.
Over the years Coplex has helped launch multiple Valley startups including Qwick, Yellowbird and Insurmi. The deal with Phoenix Children's is its first major project following a rough stretch in the pandemic.
