Why Finding Investors Who Understand Your Product is Critical

Kevin Goodwin has already been part of a medical first. In 1998, he founded Sonosite, which released the first point-of-care ultrasound device (PoCUS) the following year. It was a classic startup story: Sonosite hit NASDAQ immediately after launching, with no product, no approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and no revenue.

But Kevin knew the technology was ready, and it had the power to change medicine. Instead of having to schedule patients for a scan and transport them to radiology, healthcare workers could bring the device to their hospital beds.

Sonosite was acquired by Fujifilm in 2012, and Kevin left the company in 2014. By that point, he felt that the PoCUS device market he helped originate had grown stagnant.

Just as Moore’s Law predicted, computers were getting smaller and less expensive to build, while also becoming more powerful. At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) was making machine learning (ML) a reality. Yet PoCUS devices were still large and expensive, and the images were not all that detailed.

In 2015, Kevin co-founded EchoNous to make a handheld PoCUS device that cost significantly less than the models used as the standard in hospitals. Even more ambitious, it would use AI and ML to not only deliver more accurate results, but to improve the detail and accuracy of those results over time. The company’s AI-powered Kosmos platform was approved by the FDA in 2020.

In this episode of Medsider, Kevin explains the pros and cons of public versus private investors, what happens when a competitor with an inferior product dominates the headlines, and why the toughest potential customers are the ones you should try to win over first.