Evan Eckersley, Icarus Medical - Personalized Knee Braces for Function & Movement | LSI USA '24

Evan Eckersley 0:00  
Hi. I'm Evan Eckersley CEO and co founder of Icarus. And before we get started, I just want to survey the room very quickly. How many of you know someone that has knee pain in their lives? Almost everybody, right? And so this is a condition that most of us can relate to. This is where a Chris's story starts. Dave, our CEO and founder, like many played high school sports, and he suffered a knee injury early on in life, which later developed into chronic knee arthritis. So Dave's in his 30s, had a bad surgical outcome, and was left in a situation where he couldn't do the things that he loved, like skiing, snowboarding, wakeboarding. So he's trapped with no solution for his need being way too young for a knee replacement. And wondering how do I solve this problem. But it turns out that this is a massive problem affecting one in 10 Americans. And in fact, if you lose your mobility, you lose your quality of life and your health. So this disease is associated with so many lost quality life years annually. And there's no effective conservative solution again. So we're looking at a massive market, we're looking at no current solution, besides a total knee replacement that actually works. And we know that a huge subset of this population is not a candidate for a surgery because they're too young, or they have comorbidities. If you look at the conservative care market for knee arthritis, it accounts for $6.5 billion, with a pretty substantial annual growth rate. And so that brings us to our solution, we call it the ascender. I'll show you how it works. So this is the only brace out there that can effectively unload all three compartments of the knee, including the patellofemoral compartment. And so the user can adjust the amount of support they receive using this dial. And so when you bend down, it simply springs you back up. So what that's doing in reality is providing 40 pounds of assistance to the joint, the user can fully control that with a dial. We also customize the devices at scale using standard print technology. I'll get to that in a little bit. And it's a very lightweight device. So it feels like it's just part of the user. To go into a bit more depth on the biomechanics. When say a patient is standing from a seated position, their quadricep is firing and driving the patella into the femur. This generates a very substantial force. What the brace does is it simply counteracts that force directly, and we see a major reduction in the pressure within the joint. So the result, more importantly, is pain relief. 98% of our patients and prospective studies indicate substantial pain relief, the average pain reduction we're seeing is 61% 37% improvement in their function. And really interestingly, what we're seeing is that 83% of our patients are delaying a knee surgery. So that reduces their risk allows them to extend the life of their current knee. If you're comparing our technology to other braces on the market, if you look at Acoust survey, which measures improvement in eHealth. We're three times better currently than the leading knee brace on the market for DOA. And we're even approaching some of the outcomes that are reported in literature for a total knee replacement. So again, this is a conservative solution that's effective. But it's not just about the data points. So Beverly is a patient back home and Virginia. And I had the fortune of fitting her with her custom brace personally. And she No exaggeration, went into tears when she tried this on for the first time because she had such relief. So this has allowed her to continue working, get back to doing the things she loved and start living a more healthy lifestyle. But the function isn't the only thing. So we're bringing a cool and innovative way of making these devices, which we think is going to revolutionize bracing across the industry. So it starts with a rapid scan from an iPhone, if you have an iPhone, you can go to the App Store, download our app, just search at Chris medical. And in a matter of seconds, you can take a rapid scan just like that you can submit that to the cloud anywhere in the world. And from there, we've created a robust design automation algorithm that fits that brace to the patient. From there, we print everything locally. We can do this at scale, we can do it within 24 hours, and we can scale indefinitely by adding printing capacity. So again, looking at the competition and the existing braces on the market. These braces might be good for stabilization, but they haven't demonstrated consistent and significant outcomes in terms of pain. We're unloading functional weight from the joint. And we produce these devices at scale using custom scan to print technology. So what we realized very quickly is that this is not just about one brace. But this is about every brace in the market. And we've seen that we can apply three platform technologies to address unmet needs across the board. So the first is controlling forces around a joint. The second is our scanner, 3d print software. And then the third would be our adjustment mechanisms and dials that we've patented to control that force. So again, we launched the flagship product back in 21. Since then, we have 18 patents, eight of those have been awarded tender pending, that covers every joint in the body, it covers devices and software. And these are just a few of the products that we're launching this year. We have a very robust portfolio. And so we launching two products each year, for the next coming years. What this means from a business model standpoint is that our revenue ramp rate is increasing, because every time we launch a new product, we're distributing it into the same sales channels and using the same manufacturing infrastructure that we've already built out. So again, it's a situation where one plus one isn't two, but it's three or more. Diving into the business model, we have a traditional business to business approach, reaching accounts and four channels. The VA and DoD is a huge customer on P clinics, and orthopedics, including some major health networks, we reach that through a W two team currently with 15 reps. The brace is covered by insurance, Medicare pays pretty well at $1,300. And we've recently found some additional codes that are going to cover our hinge technology. Our gross margins are robust to 80% right now. We also realize that there's a huge direct to consumer opportunity where we can reach patients that experience pain in their daily lives through social media with testimonials. So for every dollar in ad spend, we've seen the potential to generate 12 in revenue. And so this is an off the shelf variant of the brace that we'll be launching into a direct to consumer market later this year. This is one of the uses of funds for our Series A and we'd love to talk to you and hear your thoughts on whether you think this will be successful in the market and how we can make it successful. So all this coming together, we've had some success. From a financial standpoint, we've been a bootstrap company. We launched our flagship back in 2001. And we've been doubling every year. We think we can continue to do that over the next coming years. And we even broke, broke even back in q4. So we're looking to continue that profitability we expect to generate a growing profit this year and beyond. And this is exciting from an exit standpoint. There is a lot of activity in this industry. There are companies that are bracing companies there are other strategics like CONMED that might look to acquire it, Chris a few years down the road. We're fortunate to have an amazing team on top of our 30 plus employees we have some great leadership with decades of experience in med device technology. Over eight exits between the group I want to know Mark huddle we brought on recently we're extremely excited. He comes from Stryker, and he was involved in exits with ortho sensor and Globus. We also have Bill Bugbee at Scripps, who many consider to be one of the world's foremost experts in knee surgery, and certainly patellofemoral knee surgery. So now we're kicking off a series a raise, we're raising $7 million for four areas of growth. We're scaling our profitable DTC model that I described. We're launching two additional products this year. We're going to expand our domestic sales force which we see to be reproducible. And then lastly, we've obtained our CEE marks we'll be expanding into Europe and other international countries. So with that, thank you come up, try out our products. We'd love to talk to you. Thank you