Medical device startup raises nearly $1M via crowdfunding campaign

Oracle Health, a Safety Harbor-based medical technology startup, has added to its fundraising haul with a nearly $1 million campaign on Republic.co, a crowdfunding website. The capital, according to founder and CEO Jaeson Bang, adds to the $1.2 million the company raised in 2020, and $2 million it recently received from a pair of “super angel” investors.

“The goal for this year is $8 million,” Bang told the Catalyst. “We’re going to be reaching $4 million by July.”

Oracle Health is developing a tiny cardiac device that can easily be inserted into a patient’s chest to monitor and prevent heart failure hospitalizations. It’s designed to improve upon wearable monitors, which Bang said do not offer the same level of long-term, accurate monitoring. The Oracle Health solution is also an alternative to invasive catheter lab procedures that are accurate but complex and expensive.

Jae Bang, founder and CEO of Oracle Health

Bang said the device should be ready for testing in animals by the end of the year, and if all goes well, he expects to win FDA approval in 2022 and then go to market in 2023. The market opportunity, he said, is potentially lucrative, with the annual cost of heart failure hospitalizations in the range of $21 billion.

“The total addressable market,” Bang said, “is $5 billion. And that’s just for patients who are in immediate need of this solution.”

With just one major player, Abbott Laboratories, dominating the space, Bang said the heart failure monitoring market is both large and limited. “A lot of companies are trying to go after that heart monitoring space,” he said, adding that Abbott’s product excels at accuracy but is “super expensive and very complex … they suffer from low adoption.”

With a projected cost of around $5,000, Oracle Health’s product can be highly competitive in the market, Bang said. It can be implanted into a patient via a simple, two-minute office procedure that doesn’t require a hospital visit. And best of all, physicians can monitor patients’ heart and lung performance remotely.

“Heart failure is like a two-edged sword,” Bang said. “It could be a false alarm and you still get admitted to the hospital.”

Oracle Health’s concept landed it a spot in JLABS at Texas Medical Center in Houston. JLABS is part of Johnson & Johnson’s Innovation division and provides an infrastructure and resources for more than 300 emerging life science companies. The company was also part of Tampa Bay Wave’s 2020 TechDiversity Accelerator cohort.

As a result of its participation in JLABS, Bang was given office space at the Texas Medical Center, a $50 million facility. “They give it to certain startups that are aligned with their mission and potential market,” Bang said.

Click here to see how Oracle Health’s heart failure monitoring device is implanted in a patient.

Click here to watch an episode of the Catalyst‘s Startup Report featuring Jaeson Bang.