This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 5, 2012 - Sean Morris didn’t intend for Veniti, his medical device company, to have quite the air of classical grandiosity that it does. The name was merely a combination derived from “venous” and “nitinol,” a metal alloy.
Loosely translated from Latin, however, it bears a similarity to the root for “he has come.”
“I chuckled a little bit,” said the 40-year-old, “because I thought that somebody [might have] thought I had purposely called the company Veniti, as though ‘here I am everybody, I’ve done this.’”
What he’s done is create a company strongly focused on the venous system, the network of veins that returns blood to the heart. Founded in 2010, Veniti is the only company Morris knows of that offers a multiple-unit line geared exclusively towards venous concerns. Others he’s aware of are single-offering ventures. Veniti hopes to field three products – the Veni RF Plus, the Vidi Vena Cava Filter and the Vici Venous Stent.
Veni, Vidi, Vici, of course. I came. I saw. I conquered.
“I always joke around that if we have a fourth product, we don’t know what we are going to call it,” he said. “We’ll have to figure out some more things Julius Caesar might have said.”
As the name implies, he hopes to conquer a niche in the marketplace. Housed in Des Peres, his company is native to the St. Louis area though Morris is originally from Kansas City. He worked at a medical device company in upstate New York where he ran a multi-million dollar division and recognized venous products as a potential growth area.
He quickly found himself working on a new enterprise in the Gateway City, where his wife is from.
Today, Veniti is staking its hopes on its signature trio of items, a stent designed for venous anatomy, a filter that could stop clots before they cause an embolism and a device that uses radio frequency to create steam as a treatment for varicose veins.
Morris hopes to see revenue from at least two products by the first half of next year. He said he’s excited about what he’s seen in the region and he’s deeply committed to growing his company in St. Louis.
“There’s a lot of work to do and a lot of room to grow but the basic pieces are here,” he said. “You’ve got support. You’ve got money. You’ve got great educational institutions in Washington University, St. Louis University and the University of Missouri. For my industry, you’ve got excellent hospital systems like Barnes-Jewish, St. Louis University Hospital and the Mercy network. You have a lot of talent in terms of idea creation. Long-term sustainability as a life-sciences region is obtainable.”
He hopes Veniti can play a role in building a biotech footprint. The company has already acquired or merged with two others.
“Both companies, interestingly enough were in Silicon Valley so we had a St. Louis company acquiring companies in Silicon Valley,” he said. “Usually it’s the other way around.”
He hopes he’s helping to build a footprint in other ways as well. He’s not only managed to attract venture capital from other cities around the nation but something else just as important.
“We’ve also been importing talent from the traditional medical device cities into St. Louis, literally having people move their families to come work here,” he said. “In a lot of ways, we’re really swimming against the current.”
That’s because it can be tough to bring in people to an area where there is not as much of a presence in the industry as in some other parts of the country. He said it shows that new hires have a lot of faith in the company.
“People are willing to take a relatively significant risk in uprooting their families,” he said. “They are not coming here knowing there are 30 other medical device companies that they could come work for if things didn’t work out at Veniti. You can make that assumption if someone were to move to Minnesota, Boston or Silicon Valley.”
He thinks the capital environment is very good and needs to maintain momentum on building infrastructure.
"That all starts with bringing in the right talent, educating, having some success stories, having some investors who can help out, which is very important to medical device companies," he said.
What counts are results and the bottom line.
“They may be investing because they really want to help out St. Louis but at the end of the day, they want to have a return on their investment as well,” he said.
“You need to ensure they have good outcomes and that’s where good diligence, good infrastructure, can support getting the money from these independently wealthy individuals into the hands of the CEOs and the people that are creating jobs, technologies and companies," Morris continued. "I think we’re starting to get there.”
Morris said the med-tech field often faces special challenges. The regulatory process can be daunting and the waits that it creates can bring about the need for continuous capital. He also voiced concerns over health reform, which levied an extra tax on medical device makers as part of its revenue structure.
“We have no revenues yet so it’s nice and stressful – in a good way,” he said. “It just takes time to complete your R & D, all the clinical testing and submitting literally thousand-page documents to the FDA and convincing them that what you intend to bring to market is going to be safe and it’s going to do what you say it’s going to do.”
Challenges aside, he’s confident about the future.
“Tough times are learning opportunities so it’s great. I’m very optimistic,” he said. “If it wasn’t tough, everybody would be doing it.”