With over $450,000 on the line, 20 start-up companies recently took part in Texas A&M Innovation’s 10th annual New Ventures Competition — a Shark Tankesque contest in which companies present their ideas to a panel of experts.
By the end of the multi-round competition, only six finalists remained with Houston-based medical device company Tarus Vascular ultimately coming out on top. The company began in 2022 and has since raised millions through the development of a new minimally invasive stent designed to treat aortic aneurysms — large bulges that can occur in the wall of the body’s main artery.
Founder and CEO Matthew Kuhn said the company got its start at the Texas Medical Center Innovation Biodesign Program in Houston.
“We’re developing technology to prophylactically drain what are called endo-leaks. Endo-leaks are the most common complication that patients experience after being treated for abdominal aortic aneurysms,” he said. “We have a technology to place a small shunt …. [it] creates a drainage pathway to allow for the decompression of an aneurysm sac after treatment.”
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Kuhn, who holds a master’s in biomedical engineering from Rice University, said he had known many colleagues in the innovation world who had gone through the New Ventures Competition (TNVC).
“I’m an engineer by training; I spent the first part of my career working for Johnson & Johnson,” he said. “I lucked into a really excellent rotational program. That allowed me to bounce around to different areas of the business and learn about quality, new product development [and] manufacturing.”
Having competed in TNVC last year, Kuhn, 30, said the competition has improved his ability to effectively communicate his company’s innovations to a larger audience.
“[I] learned a lot about how to pitch our story and how to present a compelling business case,” he said. “Groups of four companies present to a room of about 15 judges [with] 10 minutes of presentation time and then 10 minutes of Q&A. Then the judges deliberate and select the best-performing team and least-performing team.”
After multiple rounds, Kuhn said he and his small company of just a handful of employees won first place and received a total of $45,000 in prizes. Since winning the competition, the company has received $1.4 million in first seed funding.
“That gives us the capital that we’re going to need to kick off some of the more expensive product development preclinical testing activities,” he said. “We’re doing our first chronic animal [study] at the Texas Heart Institute at the end of this month, which is really exciting.”
Kuhn said that Houston has recently become a hub for biotech innovation and medical tech start-ups.
“We’re located and headquartered at the Texas Medical Center Innovation Factory, which is a shared workspace for start-ups, innovators [and] entrepreneurs,” he said. We’re in a 30,000 square-foot maker space where we can do all of our prototyping in-house. That equipment is an engineer’s paradise.”
Other companies, such as Harmony Desalting, were also finalists in TNVC. The Harmony start-up began in 2021 and hopes to develop a more energy efficient way to purify ocean water.
Harmony’s head of business development, Haig Rickerby, said he and CEO Quantum Wei found out about TNVC from Texas A&M University petroleum professor Hamidreza Samouei.
“I helped us get a prize, the global prize in desalination innovation,” he said. “If you get accepted, you go to Saudi Arabia and over there [Wei] met a professor from Texas A&M who was like, ‘Hey, I would love if your technology could help concentrate the grind to do a higher concentration,’ which is essentially what we do when we increase water recovery. … He knew that we were a poor little start-up and he told use about the [TNVC] competition.”
The need for desalination is expected to increase drastically over the next few years and making the process more efficient could help millions of people, Rickerby, 24, said.
“Essentially our goal is to help provide freshwater solutions to people in remote locations who don’t have access to water,” he said. “Then ultimately, as corny as it sounds, we want to make fresh water available for everybody. The cost of water production … is really, really high. It’s not easily accessible for certain remote locations because of that high energy demand.”
While the company might have only received about $8,000 for its sixth-place finish, Rickerby said every little bit counts when a company is trying to get off the ground.
“When you’re a bootstrap start-up, money goes to wherever it needs to be,” he said. “We actually recently went to the Caribbean Desalination Association Conference in the Bahamas and basically the money from the competition helped us fund that trip.”