The Roux Institute at Northeastern University, a graduate school and research center in Portland, last week announced the nine companies accepted to its Future of Healthcare Founder Residency program.
The year-long residency program is aimed at supporting innovative healthtech companies and creating a thriving ecosystem for healthcare entrepreneurship in Maine. The state’s two largest healthcare systems, Northern Light Health and MaineHealth, as well as Maine Venture Fund, are funding the program.
“If you think about life sciences in Massachusetts, it wasn’t necessarily there 50 years ago, but the pieces were there,” Ben Chesler, director of venture creation and acceleration at the Roux Institute, was quoted as saying in Northeastern’s article announcing the news. “We view this as taking the first step of creating that thriving healthtech sector here in Maine.”
The nine participating companies, which hail from three countries and five states, include teams building an AI-enabled virtual healthcare assistant, addressing maternal mortality, and cancer detection. Two of the companies—EmTech Care Labs and Apriqot—are based in Maine.
“These nine healthtech companies are tackling pressing needs, from maternal mortality to healthcare professional burnout,” Chris Wolfel, Northeatern’s associate vice president for entrepreneurship and venture creation, told Maine Startups Insider. “The technology they develop in Maine has the potential to improve patient outcomes around the world.”
As part of the program, each company receives a $50,000 investment, as well as programmatic, mentorship, and institutional support from the Roux Institute, which takes an equity stake in each company. The companies will also be co-located on the Roux’s Portland campus during the program and have access to Northeastern University’s vast mentor pool.
Although the financial investment is noteworthy, it is only a small piece of what companies will take away from the program, according to Allyson Goida, senior program manager for the program.
“We really believe that the value lies in the three-month intensive workshopping where each founder is getting exposure to world-class experts within their field, whether it be in FDA and regulatory or successful founders that have a history in serial entrepreneurship in healthtech,” Goida said.
The residency is a spinoff of the Roux Institute’s Founder Residency program, which focuses on people of color, LGBTQ+ and women-led companies.
The residency program is a win-win-win for the Roux Institute, its healthcare partners, and the companies involved in the program, Chesler said. It offers students an opportunity to work alongside healthtech innovators, providing an on-ramp into the industry, which will boost the local health tech industry. For Northern Light Health and MaineHealth, it provides access to cutting-edge technologies that will ultimately benefit patients in Maine.
“Programs like the Future of Healthcare Founder Residency have the real potential to improve patient care, reduce healthcare costs and allow our care team to collaborate with community members on the evidence-based treatments of tomorrow right here in Maine,” MaineHealth CEO Andy Mueller, said in a statement. “MaineHealth is proud to partner with the Roux on this project as part of our vision of working together so our communities are the healthiest in America.”
The Roux Institute has plans to support 30 companies over three years through the residency and is already exploring opportunities to create more industry-specific Founder Residency programs in areas like climate tech and ocean tech.
The nine companies in the Future of Healthcare Founder Residency are:
- Althea (San Jose, California): developing an artificial intelligence virtual healthcare assistant that aims to ease staffing and burnout faced by healthcare providers
- Apriqot (Scarborough, Maine): creating a “community magnifying glass” that produces dynamic population health estimates to help highlight the factors behind inequities in health outcomes and, ultimately, inform policy
- Empallo (Boston): an MIT spinoff that is creating machine learning models that will ultimately produce more personalized treatment plans for patients with cardiovascular diseases and improve clinical trials
- EmTech Care Labs (Portland, Maine): developing a digital platform, Care-Wallet, to assist families in managing home-based long-term care
- Mother of Fact (Langdon, New Hampshire): a digital health platform provided to women’s health clinics that connect their patients with registered dieticians
- PragmaClin (St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada): a cloud-based patient monitoring and assessment tool to help neurologists assess the progression of Parkinson’s Disease in their patients
- Radiolife (Wilmington, Delaware): a startup developing a medical device called Cube Scan that can detect the presence of viruses, bacteria and even cancer cells in under 20 seconds
- Stratos Medical (Galway, Ireland): an early stage company that is working on its first product, TrackSmart, a device that aims to make vascular access easier and less damaging during hemodialysis sessions
- 119 (Ohio): a communication tool designed to guide bystanders through the appropriate response in emergency situations
