Ivenix raised $10 million in equity from 18 unnamed investors in the 1st tranche of its $50 million round, according to regulatory filings.
The company indicated that it does not expect the offering to exceed 1 year. It has not made a formal statement about how it plans to spend the newly-acquired funds.
The Massachusetts-based start-up hopes to reinvent the infusion pump. In November, CEO Stuart Randle told Drug Delivery Business News that when he was approached with the corner office offer in January, he revisited the infusion pump industry and saw that the technology had not kept up with the changing hospital environment.
“The pumps that are in the marketplace today are like your desktop computer from 10 years or so ago,” Randle said. “What we’re developing is kind of the iPhone or the Tesla, the current generation of technology for IV infusion.”
Infusion pumps are used by hospitals to intravenously deliver large and small volumes of drugs from saline to hormones and opiates. The infusion pump market is poised to reach $4.7 billion by next year, according to Ivenix.
But problems abound in the industry – software can incorrectly register the intended drug dose, false or delayed alarms prevent proper patient care, and ambiguous or inconsistent user interfaces make the devices difficult to work with. There is also a general lack of integration between pumps and hospital IT systems.
Randle pointed to a recent report by medtech watchdog ECRI Institute which named infusion pumps as #1 on its list of top 10 medtech hazards. Infusion pumps have consistently topped that list, he noted, and the 3 major manufacturers that dominate the industry – Becton Dickinson subsidiary CareFusion, Baxter and Hospira – are not bringing innovative technology to market to address these problems. The FDA receives more reports of adverse infusion pump incidents each year than for any other medical technology, Ivenix reported.
While other companies have made incremental changes to their technologies, Randle says Ivenix sees a tremendous business opportunity to develop something new. “It’s kind of the classic innovators dilemma,” Randle said. “What do you do with an old technology when there’s new technology coming along?”
