ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Given their backgrounds in the world of Big Medtech, the principals of Treo Ventures have adopted a strategy built about large market opportunities, large investments, and an incubator/accelerator to supplement a portfolio of later-stage companies with an early-stage component.
The roots of Treo Ventures go back almost 20 years when Brad Vale and Mudit Jain worked together at Johnson & Johnson Development Corp. (JJDC), the venture arm of Johnson & Johnson. Jain had earlier worked in the Cardiac Rhythm Management (CRM) unit of Guidant Corp. and would eventually move on to Synergy Life Science Partners, an early stage, medical device venture firm that had invested in companies such as Inspire Medical Systems, iRhythm Technologies and Aptus Endosystems, among others. Brad Vale had started his J&J career at Ethicon and the Corporate Office of Science & Technology before joining JJDC. Venture investing in medical device companies at the time was just coming out of a low point, as traditional venture investors in the last half of the 1990s stepped back, opening the field for non-traditional investors such as corporate investors, and in particular JJDC, which had been investing since 1973. It would be a while before equity investments by strategics would truly fill the gap left by traditional investors, but groups like JJDC were, at least anecdotally, becoming important sources of capital for start-ups.
