A Merseyside healthcare start-up is set for a major expansion after landing a number of investments.
Gavin Trafford
Inovus Medical
Inovus Medical was founded by Dr Elliot Street and Jordan Van Flute six years ago when they invented a medical simulator for training doctors in keyhole surgery. The company marketed the product at a fraction of the cost of existing models and have attracted orders from within the UK and abroad.
Inovus Medical has now secured £100,000 from the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) for Healthcare as well as €50,000 European Institute of Innovation and Technology Health’s Headstart competition.
The idea for the company came when Jordan was an undergraduate researching psychomotor testing and predicting operator performance in laparoscopic surgery. At university, Jordan found that access to affordable surgical simulators were only available through university and hospital clinical skills lab.
Inspired by their frustration, Elliot and Jordan began working on a prototype for an affordable and accessible alternative in the bedroom of Jordan’s family home in Widnes.
Inovus Medical now has eight different healthcare simulators on the market including a number of versions of their original keyhole surgery simulator is used by nearly 100 hospitals in the NHS.
Speaking about the company’s progress, Elliot said: " Inspired by their frustration, Elliot and Jordan began working on a prototype for an affordable and accessible alternative in the bedroom of Jordan’s family home in Widnes. Launch of the first product was followed by scaling up operations to Jordan’s garage followed by two further moves to progressively larger units in St Helens.”
The company will use its latest investment from SBRI to introduce augmented reality and software addition to enhance existing products.
“The funding from SBRI will allow us to deliver a premium product whilst maintaining our affordable price point that has become so popular among our customers. It will ultimately increase the access to high quality and realistic surgical simulation across the globe and level the playing field when it comes to accessing augmented and virtual reality simulation products. Our aim is to become the number one choice in surgical simulation, globally,” said Elliot.
Jordan is the company’s chief technical officer and he has used his design and engineering skills to build the Inovus product portfolio. He said: “This has been an incredibly hard six years to get to this point, where doors have begun to open; it is a testament to our enormous resilience in pushing through some difficult times in order to put ourselves in a position to capitalise on these opportunities. I am extremely excited for the future, for us and for our growing team at Inovus.”
