How to Succeed Without Venture Capital

Key Learnings From Asha & Adam's Experience

• Being a startup CEO takes balancing speed, adaptability, and informed decision-making. To maintain momentum, aim to act decisively with 40-70% of the information rather than waiting for complete certainty. Clinical feedback early on is vital. If you lack it, bring in the right expertise through co-founders, partnerships, or advisors. Above all, keep listening to feedback, even after commercialization. This can uncover applications for your tech that you never imagined.

• When choosing your clinical/regulatory roadmap, start where you can leverage local resources, which is typically where you live. But if you aim to be a global company, it’s important to understand the trade-offs between pursuing regulatory pathways in different regions. Even if you meet the regulatory bare minimum, keep investing in clinical data that demonstrates market value.

• VC funding can be alluring, but it often undermines your control over the company’s direction. Be strategic when choosing investors—physicians can be excellent candidates as they bring considerable credibility to your venture. The most important factors are having a compelling story that clearly outlines how your solution solves a clear need and consistently executing against your milestones.

Drs. Asha Parekh and Adam Power co-founded Front Line Medical Technologies in 2017. We hosted Asha back in 2021. At the time, Front Line’s team was refining their flagship product, COBRA-OS. Today, the company is commercial in Canada and Europe, with other regions underway.

COBRA-OS stands for control of bleeding, resuscitation, and arterial occlusion system. It’s the world’s smallest life-saving aortic occlusion device that offers a fast, minimally invasive way to control bleeding and sustain critical organ perfusion until definitive care is available. It’s designed to tackle a life-threatening issue in trauma care: non-compressible torso hemorrhage (NCTH). NCTH causes the patient to rapidly lose blood into the chest or abdomen, and is the leading cause of preventable death in trauma patients before they reach the hospital. Beyond trauma, COBRA-OS has proven invaluable in military battlefield settings, postpartum hemorrhage, and pre-hospital emergencies.

Adam is a practicing vascular surgeon with a background in medical device innovation and firsthand experience in trauma care. Asha, a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, brings technical expertise to the team. They came together during a fellowship program for engineers and clinicians, and ultimately founded Front Line in 2017. They fully committed to the venture within a year and have spent the last six years fine-tuning their technology and working through the challenges of bringing it to market.

Today, Front Line is entering a growth phase. After successfully launching COBRA-OS in North America, the company has expanded into European markets and is preparing further international announcements regarding its trial on nonischemic cardiac arrest. “We’re scaling up, growing internationally, and exploring new applications to help as many patients as possible,” Adam shares.