Designing Your Device for Adoption

Creative Financing + Resilient Investors = Winning Capital Strategy

InfoBionic’s experience raising capital across multiple rounds offers a playbook for medtech startups aiming to preserve flexibility while extending their runway. Rather than relying solely on traditional equity, Stuart has pursued a balanced approach — blending equity with carefully structured venture debt to optimize capital efficiency.

“Equity is what I would call prime real estate,” Stuart says. “You want to be real careful with how you dole that out.” By using a mix of debt and equity strategically, InfoBionic has been able to fund growth initiatives while minimizing dilution.

A key to this approach has been working with debt partners willing to support the company through difficult periods. “When things got tough, they hung in there with us,” Stuart notes. “They were easy to work with, and that creates some loyalty.” That loyalty has led InfoBionic to renew partnerships with the same lenders multiple times.

But perhaps the most distinctive element of Stuart’s capital strategy lies in forging investment relationships with healthcare systems. Mayo Clinic — one of InfoBionic’s most prominent partners — serves as investor, customer, and distribution channel. The relationship not only lends market credibility, but also creates access to data, research, and clinical pathways that would otherwise be out of reach for a mid-sized company.

“It’s difficult to go and try to negotiate with UnitedHealthcare or others as a small startup,” Stuart explains. “Whereas a large health system with a venture arm has a much different voice in that conversation.”

This alignment has also enabled more than financial backing. Through a “Know-How Agreement” with Mayo Clinic, InfoBionic collaborates on bringing academic AI research into the market — pairing Mayo’s clinical expertise and regulatory familiarity with InfoBionic’s commercial infrastructure. “They need a conduit to get it to market,” Stuart says. “If you can align yourself to be that conduit, it creates real value on both sides.”

Underlying all of this is Stuart’s belief that the most important quality in an investor isn’t just favorable terms — it’s resilience. “It’s all about staying in the game, doing whatever it takes to fight, especially when you’re committed to your cause,” he says. If the business succeeds, there’s always time to renegotiate terms later.

That long-game thinking has paid off. Nearly a decade after InfoBionic’s commercial launch, some of the company’s earliest investors are still on the cap table. “They believed in the cause,” Stuart reflects. “That surprised me the most — I expected things to change, for people to lose belief. But they’ve stuck around.”

How To Leverage Different Commercial Models to Win in a Crowded Market

When Stuart took the reins at InfoBionic, he brought with him a commercialization playbook honed through his medtech leadership experience — pipeline management, demand generation, and telemarketing. 

But none of it worked in the cardiovascular service space. The landscape had shifted, and InfoBionic had to as well.

“I had hung my hat on a core competency of learning how to build pipelines,” Stuart explains. “But threw it all out the window when I got here. It was like we were just knocking on doors, and the houses were empty.”

He knew InfoBionic would need to get more creative to achieve market penetration. That realization sparked a pivot to a multi-channel strategy focused on getting in through the employee door.

In hospitals, where established cardiac reps already dominated, cold calls and traditional outreach simply didn’t work. “In a hospital, you can't just go in the front door,” Stuart says. “You have to be registered or you have to be part of the system, or you have to be on contract with the hospital. There's no such thing as cold calling a hospital anymore.”

Instead, Stuart shifted to a relationship-driven sales strategy, tapping into networks of independent reps who had spent decades earning trust with electrophysiologists. These reps could unlock high-value accounts — but only covered narrow slices of the market. To scale, Stuart knew he needed a lot of them.

It was a different story when approaching independent cardiology providers. Unlike larger systems, cold-calling could be effective as long as reps could make a compelling case for switching service providers. With no hardware to uninstall and no EMR integration barriers, the switching cost was low. 

To stand out with these providers, reps need to “get a foothold in there. Then, you get a few devices in and work upstream.” Stuart adds, “If you can understand what the failings are of your competitors without talking bad about them, but go in and talk about how you're better in those key areas, it doesn't take much to switch.”

InfoBionic’s sales strategy — combining direct sales, independent reps, and strategic partners like Mayo Clinic and others — enabled the company to navigate a crowded market and gain traction among target provider groups.