Eduardo Jorgensen founded Medicsen to improve the care of people with diabetes. Witnessing the struggles of patients taking insulin inspired Eduardo to leave medicine and build a device and an app to simplify the control of blood sugar by patients.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Eduardo Jorgensen, Founder of Medicsen
What Medicsen is all About
The Suggin App and What it Does
Making an Insulin Device That Does Not Require Needle Injection
Discussing Product Patents
Sonophoresis: Sound Based Drug Delivery
Raising the Funds for the Company
The Role Models Behind the Startup
"Even if you're comfortable getting out of your comfort zone, doing that as a dad, it's a hard thing to do."
Funding for Angel Investors
Making Medicsen Profitable
Deep Dive into the Suggin App
How the Product Works With the App
Perseverance Regardless of Low Funds and No Business Experience
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Transcript of, “Medicsen: Insulin Minus Pain"
Guest: CEO and founder Eduardo Jorgensen
Episode 197 Eduardo Jorgensen Transcript
Sal Daher Introduces Eduardo Jorgensen, Founder of Medicsen
Sal Daher: Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting Angels and Founders. Today, we are privileged to have with us, Eduardo Jorgensen who studied medicine in Spain and has a medical startup that he's going to tell us about. Eduardo is presently located in the Canary Islands. His startup is set up remotely in various areas around Spain. He is also participating in the accelerator at M2D2 of the University of Massachusetts. I'm grateful to them for putting us together. Richard Meiklejohn, thank you. Anyway, welcome, Eduardo Jorgensen.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Thank you very much. Glad to be here.
What Medicsen is all About
Sal Daher: Eduardo looks like a Viking but speaks like a Spaniard. Eduardo, tell me what problem Medicsen is solving.
Eduardo Jorgensen: As a medical doctor, I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. In fact, I used to spend my summers doing surgery and putting deep brain electrodes. In my fifth grade of medical school, I was in a consult and a young patient with diabetes said that she just didn't want to keep injecting insulin ever again. I was completely shocked about that because I had just studied the diabetes disease in itself. I had studied the treatment methods and I felt that people were covered, but when the patient went out of the room, the doctor that was there with me told me that that was the quality of life for patients.
There were efforts to solve the main problems that she was complaining that she had to inject a thousand times per year. Her friends laughed at her as if she was a weirdo. She was constantly worried about if her glucose was good or bad and if that was going to prevent her from going to a birthday party, for example. It was in the end, very, very tough for her.
I just got out of there completely convinced that it had to change. I dropped my clinical path and co-founded Medicsen with another friend from medical school and two friends from telecommunications engineering that we had met in law school.
Sal Daher: Outstanding. Explain to us the solution you're building.
The Suggin App and What it Does
Eduardo Jorgensen: In that moment, we came up with an idea for a non-invasive artificial pancreas to solve the problems of that kid and diabetic population in general. We quickly realized it was too big of a project for a small startup. We divided it into a couple of pieces. We created first the software that can predict future glucose levels up to two hours in advance and give advices to patients. It answers questions like what happens if I drink a coke in 30 minutes, what if I go for a one-hour hike?
We let them know how their glucose is going to go and if they need to know anything to be safe, like, for example, just eat some nuts before going for that walk because alternatively, you'll get a hypoglycemic event. We have that completed. We have another free app called Suggin, S-U-G-G-I-N, although it's not available yet in the United States because we have to go through a full different regulatory process because it's a medical device. We've done some business with that part, with the private industry where we keep it free for patients.
We want to learn and make the algorithms better because our ultimate goal is to connect that with the other technological product that we have invented, which is a needle-free drug delivery device in the shape of a patch. It is basically, instead of using needles or microneedles or those painful ways of delivering insulin, we came up with a combination of ultrasonic waves that increase the permeability of the skin and allow us to push the drugs through it without any kind of pain.
We build that setting into our comfortable wearable patch. It's like five centimeters times three centimeters and it's flexible as well. It has a battery that lasts for three days. It can hold 200 units of insulin. It covers around those three days of battery life for most patients and the best part is that it can be adapted to a wide range of different molecules like Heparin, interferon for multiple sclerosis, vaccines, antibodies, a lot of them.
Sal Daher: Where is the app usable? I see that it's on Google Play.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Yes, it's on Google Play and Europe.
Sal Daher: It's not approved for use in the United States. Is it approved for use in Europe?
Eduardo Jorgensen: Yes, we have the CE mark as it is a class one medical device, and it's regulated and approved.
Sal Daher: Excellent. How many people are on it? You must be getting a lot of data.
Eduardo Jorgensen: We just released it back in November. We're still growing. We managed over the last couple of years to get to a community of around 3000 patients. The algorithm has received information from a lot of patients, a lot of different scenarios. Now what we're doing is that we're investing, for the first time in our lives, in a little bit of marketing to grow our community even more.
Sal Daher: Interesting. I wonder if the app itself could not be commercially viable just on its own separate from the device?
Eduardo Jorgensen: We've considered it. We've considered it. First, we have to validate it. We know that there's a product-market fit in there, because we've built it with patients, but it is a continuous process of improvement. We still need a couple of knots to tie.
Making an Insulin Device That Does Not Require Needle Injection
Sal Daher: Interesting, interesting. This is three days of battery life in the device for getting insulin via the skin ultrasonically, how big is it now, by the way?
Eduardo Jorgensen: I think 5 times 3 times 1.4 centimeters. It's not extremely small, but it's not big, either. It's more or less the size of the infusion pumps that are attached to the skin that patients are used to. We had that goal in mind.
Sal Daher: The place that you're thinking of attaching it is on the arm, on the torso--
Eduardo Jorgensen: Or the abdomen.
Sal Daher: Basically, you're using ultrasound to make the skin permeable, and it gets into some blood vessels, and then it circulates within the blood vessel, what's the path for the insulin?
Eduardo Jorgensen: The delivery route is the same that is used with the infusion pumps or the injection pen. We're using the subcutaneous drug delivery location. From there, it diffuses exactly as the drug does from the other molecules. The only thing that we changed is the mechanism to get it through the skin.
Sal Daher: Right. What is your intellectual property protection for the device and for this method of delivery?
Eduardo Jorgensen: The first thing, we spent four years doing hundreds of thousands of repetitions of similar trials in a [unintelligible 00:07:16] cell, which is the skin similar to human skin, in this case, it was from a pig. We started stimulating it with certain conditions in order to reach the optimal setting of ultrasonic parameters, that was frequency, intensity, times activated, and deactivated, all that stuff. Once we got to that, which we keep as a trade secret internally, we built an ultrasonic transducer based on that.
We did it in a way that's pretty innovative because it can generate different types of ultrasonic waves within the same device. That was a challenge because the sound that our transducer produces is directly dependent on its size, its shape, the materials that are made. You typically get one kind or a small range of frequencies and we can get a very big range of frequencies thanks to the way that we built it.
The other part is that we optimized it. We were able to build it in a two-centimeter size, which was very very challenging as well. Consuming from a traditional battery instead of having to plug it to the wall, which is the main reason why there are no drug delivery devices based on ultrasound at the moment because they were huge and required to be plugged.
Discussing Product Patents
Sal Daher: Interesting, interesting. Trade secrets, the usual moat from competition is not trade secrets because usually, people can reverse engineer it. However, for example, the company that provided the lipid nanoparticles for the Pfizer BioNTech COVID vaccine, I don't think they had patent protection for that. They had trade secrets, they're just very, very good at producing these lipid nanoparticles. They were so good at it that Pfizer came to them to try to get them to impart some of their technology.
Eduardo Jorgensen: That makes sense.
Sal Daher: I think there's some precedents. Although, right now, Alnylam is suing Pfizer and Moderna about some aspect of the lipid nanoparticles that they were using which is curious.
Eduardo Jorgensen: I didn't explain perfectly good. We keep this setting as a trade secret, but we had protected as in as a patent, the actual buildup, the shape and size, and ultrasound transducer. That's a patent that we have, exams came positive, we're right now in the phase of entering international phases in the European patent and that will come for the PCT in November. We're good on it.
We plan on doing more patents around the release system of the insulin, which is, we have innovations in there as well and the packaging of the, not the packaging, when you put all the pieces together, of the smart parts to get a final advice. Those will be coming in the next year.
Sal Daher: You're doing this in Europe. Have you filed in the US as well?
Eduardo Jorgensen: We filed a PCT.
Sal Daher: A PCT. Okay. Yes. International. Okay, good. Very good. Have you looked at freedom to operate in the space? Are there patents in that space of delivering drugs via ultrasound?
Eduardo Jorgensen: We conducted our own freedom to operate analysis with a lawyer, with our PIP lawyers and everything came up positive but we also got the examination fees returned to us from the European Patent Office because there was so little exam to perform on it that they didn't have to get all the money that we paid. That came out positively as well.
Sonophoresis: Sound Based Drug Delivery
Sal Daher: It's a scarcely practiced area. Interesting.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Yes, and you know why? This is a technique like Sonophoresis, which is delivering drugs with sound. It's a technique that was born around the '80s or a little bit before. Ultrasound technology, as I was telling you, remain very big and it never got that deep attention. Now, it's growing in medicine, thanks to the HIFU, the high-frequency ultrasound that are vocalized in this particular place, for example, for ablation of deep brain tumors.
That's giving ultrasound another heads up in the space. In terms of Sonophoresis, we only know of three companies, including ourselves that are actually working on it right now. One of them is actually in Boston and is doing it through the rectum. It's a different kind of delivery device. It's not transdermal. It's through the colon. The other one has been for a long time but their device is wired to the wall.
Raising the Funds for the Company
Sal Daher: This is fascinating. This is really fascinating. Basically, you've gotten some non-diluted funding, you've gotten through several accelerators. You've been bootstrapping and then you did get some Angel money? Do you care to reveal how much money you've raised to date on your notes?
Eduardo Jorgensen: Up to date, we've raised, and I know for US teams and investors it's going to seem a little but here in Europe, we do double the stuff at least with that money, we've gotten around €3 million since we were founded in 2015. We've bootstrapped a lot.
Sal Daher: I'm an Angel investor. I'm not a VC. 3 million for me is serious money. I'm always looking for Angel scale life science companies because I can't play in the VC scale. The VC stakes have gone up a lot. The venture capitalists that funded Moderna, for example, they don't take pitches. If a company comes with a brilliant idea, that's not what they do. They create their own entities. This is the trend in life science VCs. Only small players, smaller VCs, and so forth will take pitches but the big players do not. $3 million is a very respectable fundraise.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Yes. Thank you.
Sal Daher: Tell me, what is the next big step for Medicsen?
Eduardo Jorgensen: We are coming to the final phases of our in vitro trials. We did a very quick, very preliminary in vivo pig trial just to make sure that we were heading the right way. It came up positive. With that confidence, we're going to start animal trials around June more or less. We expect to finish them around September and with that evidence present it to the agency to get approval for the human trials and raise a Series A of around €4 to €6 million that's going to be invested mostly in completing all the human trials and getting the prototypes ready for commercialization.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Eduardo, when that comes around, when your Series A comes around, keep me in touch.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Of course.
Sal Daher: I can connect you with some people or see if I'm still writing checks at that moment.
Eduardo Jorgensen: We hope so.
The Role Models Behind the Startup
Sal Daher: Very good. You told me how you came to this idea. Moving from being on a career path as a physician to becoming a founder is a very significant shift. Did you have a model in your family perhaps or mentor or somebody that showed you the possibility of creating a company instead of being in a very safe career, which is in medicine? Very predictable, you earn well, you have a good life, and you're not enduring all the stress that you have to endure with a startup.
How did this idea of starting your own company come about? I know the motivation. You told me the motivation. The little girl not wanting to be injected but maybe you could have thought of doing this as a professor, as a researcher, or something.
Eduardo Jorgensen: That would've been a possibility of course. The quick answer to your question is no. Initially, I didn't have a role model to follow, and that's probably the reason why after giving it a bit of thought and getting to a basic concept and idea, we put it in the drawer for a couple of months. We kept on with our lives from having it in the back of our minds, but not really doing much work for the initial, I had the idea in May 2014 up until August, we were not moving much. Then in August, I was coming out of a music festival. I love music festivals like breaking the year. That's where I go and disconnect a lot.
I was coming out of one of those and I checked Twitter and I saw a tweet saying, do you have an idea? Do you like New York? Fill up this form, and you might come, might want the possibility of coming? I did. I lived with 40 entrepreneurs in the same house in Brooklyn from September to December. That was my role model. That was what bit me into entrepreneurship.
Sal Daher: Oh my gosh.
Eduardo Jorgensen: There were people there that had seven companies on their backs that a conversation with them was like, why? Wow. Can you really do that? Because my main problem in that point was I thought I was no one to do that.
Sal Daher: What is this program?
Eduardo Jorgensen: I was lucky enough to be in the one and only edition, which is called the Startups Mansion.
Sal Daher: Startups Mansion, I see this here. Then what happened to Startups Mansion?
Eduardo Jorgensen: It transformed as a semi-startup, it evolved the concept and they became entrepreneurs. I believe it was a second edition. They did it instead of United States, they did it in Asia because they realized that it was not that much about the hub you were going, but about the people, the community that you were creating, what made them thrive. Seven years later, we're still talking every week on the WhatsApp group. That's amazing.
Sal Daher: Oh, these are your cohort that you were with over there.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Yes. Some of them are my investors now.
Sal Daher: Amazing. Amazing. These are people from everywhere.
Eduardo Jorgensen: From everywhere.
Sal Daher: This is, gosh, unbelievable.
Eduardo Jorgensen: It was amazing.
Sal Daher: Startups Mansion, five months, and it just, you saw a tweet.
"Even if you're comfortable getting out of your comfort zone, doing that as a dad, it's a hard thing to do."
Eduardo Jorgensen: Yes. I saw a tweet and what I was going to say as well is that I saw a tweet and I had to fight with my father because my father was-- my father he's a surgeon and he wanted me to be like, first become a surgeon, and then you can do whatever you want. He opposed strongly to it but in the end, I managed to do it, I managed to finish medical school as well and my father also invested a little tiny bit in the company so validating that we're doing things right.
Sal Daher: Your father being a surgeon was naturally skeptical when you wanted to give up your medical career to pursue this crazy idea of founding a medical startup. Where is your dad now on that?
Eduardo Jorgensen: It is good because he not only invested a little bit in the company, but when I graduated, we had passed a rough year before because of this disagreement, and when I graduated, he came up with me to the states and he told me, I'm proud of you, and I think that that's the moment when we got together, and I felt that he trusted my decision and the way the company was heading.
Sal Daher: I know. I think fathers always, always want the best for their children. It was very, it's very unusual. We have to search very far and wide to find someone who doesn't, but the thing is that they have the particular experience. I battled my way to the top of this pile. I'd like my son to follow, I can make things easier for him and I know how he can do it, but now, oh my gosh, he's going to go in some other direction. It was so tough to get to where I am now. Things are a lot easier today than they were before. It really is. You have so much more choice.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Yes. Even if you're comfortable getting out of your comfort zone, doing that as a dad, it's a hard thing to do.
Sal Daher: Fantastic. Fantastic. I understand that. My dad started out as an engineer and his dearest dream was to become a mathematician, but he was living in Brazil in the 1940s. He didn't have an option to become a mathematician there. I think there was one little program in maybe in the 50s in Brazil. He studied engineering and he became a professor. He did all the mathematical side of things because he always loved math.
Then when he was 42 years old, he got the opportunity to come up to Boston to do his PhD. He started out as an engineer and became a mathematician. When I went to MIT, I went as a mathematic, because I had to be, my dad's a mathematician. I went to the math department, Eduardo I was completely out of my depth. I didn't have the study habits. I was just like, my father warned me, "Junior, you have to understand, at MIT, when you go to a class, you don't go to learn, you go to show off what you know, and the problem sets aren't practice, they're not for practice. The problem sets are challenging. You have to practice before, you have to read ahead of time, do practice problems, and then you go to the class, and then maybe you can work out the problem sets."
I didn't listen to my dad. I ended up dropping out of the math department into engineering. He went from engineering to math, and I went into the least mathematical field, the civil engineering course 1, math is course 18, with a course, 1. I managed to graduate in engineering. I know about, paternal approval, disapprovals, and disagreement.
[laughter]
In the end, I think my dad was very happy with what I ended up doing. I think he understood because I didn't really end up in engineering, I ended up in finance and investing. I don't have the drive or the brain to do math the way he does. He was- he loved to be chewing on a problem for days on end. That's all he thought about. Yes, figuring that out is really tough. I salute you. That's a great story, Startups Mansion. I see it as a Startups Mansion in Bali. [laughs]
Eduardo Jorgensen: They went after I was there. Yes.
Sal Daher: They must have a lot of candidates.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Yes, yes. Cheaper.
Funding for Angel Investors
Sal Daher: I can imagine, I can imagine. Okay, so one of the discoveries that I made in the last two years, is that there is a class of life science company that doesn't require $50 million in initial funding to get off the ground. My particular focus here in the Boston area, are the biotechnology companies, for example, you know, like microfluidics. In microfluidics, you can create a design, you can build something with a few hundred thousand dollars, a few million dollars, the cost of it is actually going down all the time. I'm invested in a company that is actually creating a workflow for designing microfluidic devices. In the future, it's probably going to be cheaper to create microfluidics devices. I'm on the board of a microfluidics company.
There are a lot of these areas in the life sciences, where $5 or $6 million invested wisely, will get the company to the point where a strategic player could take a look and say, "Hmm, this could be transformative for my business." Then you can end up having a valuable company that perhaps might have an exit. It will not be a 12-year adventure, it might be a five-year adventure. As an Angel Investor, that begins to look really interesting. I've sort of developed a screen to focus on these companies. This is what I'm focusing on.
I'm thinking of raising a small fund to support Angel Investors in this because it's tremendous demand. The venture capitalists are- the big players are not investing with these companies anymore. The small players are all out. They don't have the capacity. Here in Boston, there are a lot of small life science VCs, but you know, they don't even return your phone call because they got so much going on. This is a very fertile area that you're in. I'm really impressed. It's a great story. By the way, have you run across Carlos Castro Gonzales?
Eduardo Jorgensen: Of course. Leuko.
Sal Daher: Leuko, yes.
Eduardo Jorgensen: That guy is amazing.
Sal Daher: He is amazing. He's amazing. Yes, yes. I'm an investor in a company. I love the company. He didn't manage to get venture funding. He was very persistent. He kept and he got some of the micro VCs, he's in the top small fraction of what percent of life science companies I got to get funded. The guy is just phenomenal. The team, it's a great team. It's a tremendous team from the [unintelligible] lab at MIT.
Eduardo Jorgensen: They're doing great things.
Sal Daher: Yes, they're basically looking at the capillaries on the, right above your nail, where blood flows one cell at a time. That it can count your white blood cells and decide whether or not you're immunocompromised if you're taking medication for cancer or medication for Alzheimer's or something. Yes, it really is brilliant. Yes, it really is brilliant. I love these kinds of companies. How did you connect with Carlos?
Eduardo Jorgensen: Carlos and I met- the very first award that we won took us to MIT for like a one-week trip around there so we could get to know it and everything. I met him in there. He was part of the guys that had just won the MIT innovator, the TR 35, and he nominated me for it two years after that. I've always appreciated that.
Sal Daher: Congratulations. Congratulations.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Thank you.
Making Medicsen Profitable
Sal Daher: That is tremendous, Eduardo, At this point, we've talked about the problems you're solving. Let's talk a little bit about what is the economic model that you have for making Medicsen a profitable company and paying your investors back? What are your thoughts on that?
Eduardo Jorgensen: We've given a lot of thought to this, because as you were saying, it would be very easy to find a strategic partner that could turn up to our company valuable once we have demonstrated enough and we believe that might happen. We've basically built a model in which we depend on our own, which is a business to consumer model, in a subscription way.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Eduardo Jorgensen: The device has two pieces. It has a durable part that's there to last for more than three years, it has an ultrasound generator, the batteries, the electronics, all that. Then we have a disposable piece that is attached to it, which has the insulin reservoir and the adhesive to stick it to the skin, and that one lasts for around three days. What we will do is in Europe, we are thinking around €100 a month as a starting price, and that will include the device, one device and the technical service on it. Then 10 disposables per month.
In that way, you will receive the disposables at your home every month and you keep paying the €100 per month. With that, it is a business model that has been sort of validated for the medical industry and specifically for the diabetes patients, because there is these continuous glucose monitors, which are on a subscription rolling basis and patients get paid from €100 up to a thousand euros per month for those devices. On top of that, it matches very well with that consumable part of the device that we need to create for a regulatory perspective.
Also what we are doing right now is we're trying to build a B2B model in which we will offer the device for pharmaceutical companies or medical devices companies in a license. We're trying to enter into milestone base license in which if we validate in humans we'll get money, then we'll eventually end licensing the technology for any specific vertical. We can do it with Pfizer for the COVID vaccine, with Lilly for insulin, with Sanofi for heparin and different verticals different companies.
Deep Dive into the Suggin App
Sal Daher: Okay. Now I don't think we talked about your app, Suggin during the interview, we talked about it before the interview. Would you care to explain what the app does and how it plays with the device, and, is the device receiving information from a wearable glucose monitor, continuous glucose monitor?
Eduardo Jorgensen: Yes, it is.
Sal Daher: The app talks to the glucose monitor? Explain the app.
Eduardo Jorgensen: The app we say is the best body for diabetes. It's not a mom, it's not a doctor. It's not a virtual assistant, it's your body because it's there to solve doubt. You can lean on it whenever you need. What it basically does is you create a profile, very simple, and then you connect your continuous glucose monitor. We're doing efforts to be agnostic from the continuous glucose monitoring industry, because we're now building our own. We try to connect to all of the sensors that we can, so we can give access to as many patients as possible.
What it does is, it gets that information, it analyses it, learns from the patient and it's a specific situations and then it predicts future glucose levels up to two hours in advance and offers advice. We have a chatbot interface in which the patient with text or voice can ask, "Hey, what happens if I drink a Coke in 30 minutes?" "What happens, if I go for a one hour hike?" "What happens if I eat a tortilla right now?"
Sal Daher: Right.
Eduardo Jorgensen: We will actually calculate how the glucose will evolve and tell them if it is safe, then it's okay, and if it's not safe, then we'll give them alternative advice. Like, "Hey, instead of that Coke, drink an orange juice or instead of going for a hike, just eat some peanuts before so you don't have a hypo."
All that is offered for free for patients and what we're seeing is that that prediction allows them to plan in advance, with less uncertainty than they would have before. It has a little amount of error, very, very low error once it gets a couple days of data, it has train, it understands the patient and is able to give them those advices, adapted to it.
Sal Daher: That is free and it is not approved in the US, but it is approved in the European Union?
Eduardo Jorgensen: Accessible on Google play and Huawei in Europe.
How the Product Works With the App
Sal Daher: Fantastic. How does the Suggin app or the Suggin app fit into your product path?
Eduardo Jorgensen: For efficiency research we've decided that the first generation of the small parts is going to be manual, so the user is going to have to decide the moment and the dose that they want delivered. The second generation of the device will be guided by this algorithm from Suggin. With that prediction, it's going to be able to anticipate the insulin needs of the patient. Instead of having to correct them all the time, it's going to understand the whole day-to-day, the glucose score of the patient. Yes, of course, it's going to have to make small adaptations through the day. It's going to have a predictive profile instead of a reactive setting.
Sal Daher: Now, does the continuous glucose monitor, is that invasive or is that just on the surface of the skin?
Eduardo Jorgensen: All the continuous glucose monitors that are on the market today are invasive. They have a tiny microneedle that's coated with enzymes to analyze glucose, but there are very, very advanced efforts on the market to get non-invasive, continuous glucose monitors. For example, Apple has a millionaire investment in a couple of companies, where one of them is creating a glucose sensor based on light. It is speculated that it will be included in the next or one of the next Apple watches.
Sal Daher: [laughs] Phenomenal, that is tremendous. The microneedle already makes it bearable. It's not like an injection needle. That's an interesting technology. There are companies doing things like using microneedles to cut up hair follicles to solve problems with people who have thinning hair. There's so many things happening in the life sciences. It's just like- I'm like a kid in a candy store.
Eduardo Jorgensen: I feel like that as well.
Perseverance Regardless of Low Funds and No Business Experience
Sal Daher: It's so much to do. Excellent. You talked about potential business models. We talked about the Suggin app. Is there anything else that you would like to communicate to our audience, which is two thirds guys and one third women, about 60% of it are people in their 30s and 40s, who are likely to be founders. Then the rest are Angel investors. What would you like to get across to them?
Eduardo Jorgensen: I'm going to give a final footprint. We were very lucky in our early days to have two medical co-founders and two technical co-founders. I think that was a key part to get to quick prototypes and concepts that we could evolve, and to prove that we could do it, and people would trust us. We were just out of university, we didn't have a single dollar on us. None of us had business training before, so that was not a stopper for us, so I think it shouldn't be for anyone.
Sal Daher: You didn't know it was impossible. [laughs]
Eduardo Jorgensen: That's the thing. We didn't know it was impossible.
Sal Daher: I know another founder like that, who the payment area, amazing founder. He's getting his company off the ground in the payments section. His name is Derek Canton. I tell you, the first time I saw him, I said he doesn't know it's not possible, and he didn't know it wasn't possible, so because he didn't know he made it happen. This is amazing. Derek Canton and Eduardo Jorgensen, you have this in common, and you and your co-founders. Tell me a little bit about your co-founders, what do they bring each one to the equation.
Eduardo Jorgensen: They're amazing. We got together like a puzzle in certain areas that was important to cover, and none of us individually have. Patricia, she's the other doctor. She's a general surgeon, she's only part time in the company. She has been managing the bio division of the company, making sure that we were moving forward in the right direction, that we were planning the clinical trials with the end variables accordingly. All of that has been under her plate and most of the dealing with patients as well.
César and José Carlos are telecom engineers. José Carlos is the CTO, he had previous experience with ultrasound devices during his career because he did his final degree works on a hospital with ultrasound scans and all that, so he got accustomed to them. Then César who is a telecom engineer as well. He's more strategist. He's the COO of the company. He's a good negotiator. He understands business, he's the one that understands it the better of us in terms of a corporate thing. He manages the team. In the end, he makes sure that our operations are doing correctly in all terms, providers, potential clients, agreements, team, all that.
The part that I love the most is product and innovation, but that is the part that I get the least in the company. I'm mostly on getting resources, planning the vision and how we're going to execute it and guiding team of course. As a CEO, you have to implement leadership and culture and values and all that.
Sal Daher: This is really, really fascinating. It reminds me of Leuko, it's an excellent team, that Carlos' co-founders are really, really outstanding. They have a lot of complementarity they need it. They're doing software, machine vision, they're also-- There's a life science component, there are clinical trials. It's a multidisciplinary, undertaking. Anything in medicine is going to be multidisciplinary, applying technology in medicine. It's very similar in that sense, very impressive to see this kind of stuff happening in Spain. People don't think of Spain first when they think about entrepreneurship but there are some very interesting companies.
Entrepreneurship, I think is very evenly distributed around the world. The opportunity to be an entrepreneur perhaps is not evenly distributed everywhere. It's easier in certain places, and harder in others so that's good. Very good. Unless you have any other thought Eduardo, we can wrap things up.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Yes, sure. It was a very interesting talk, I think we covered all the major aspects. I'm very happy that we could pinpoint you for the next round based on you have interest on checking up . [laughs]
Sal Daher: Yes. Keep me on the list, put my name on the list. Eduardo Jorgensen, co-founder, CEO of Medicsen which is figuring out a way to deliver insulin through the skin without a needle. Already has an app available in Europe, called Suggin, S-U-G-G-I-N.com. You can go and find that app. It's a very interesting thing. You guys have done a lot with your $3 million raise so far. I'm impressed.
Eduardo Jorgensen: We put the money to good work.
Sal Daher: Thanks for making the time to be on the Angel Invest Boston podcast.
Eduardo Jorgensen: Well, thank you very much for inviting me, Sal.
Sal Daher: This is Sal Daher.
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I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme is composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katherine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.
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