Tracy Warren and Tammi Jantzen are operating on growing their first organization together. However, the pair are far from new to MedTech recreation. Both women have pivoted to running a company after years of investing in other early-level era companies — Warren has been a banker, mission capitalist, and entrepreneur. At the same time, Jantzen turned into CFO of 3 early-stage assignment capital funds. Between them, the pair had raised finances for approximately seventy-five ventures; however, when they stepped back and checked out that mass of agencies, they found out there were few virtually devoted to girls-beneficial technology, she stated. Their area of interest changed into “the way to construct an organization round a technology,” Warren said.
We kind of desire to do something that is supposed extra to us in my view,” said Warren, the organization’s CEO. “We’re both mothers, Tammy is, in reality, a grandmother, and we desired to bring more capital to women’s fitness.” Warren and Jantzen launched Bucks County-based Astarte Medical in 2016. (Astarte is a historic Middle Eastern goddess associated with fertility.) the agency raised $5 million in a Series A spherical this spring and is the use of the funding to finish the improvement of its flagship product: nutrition, a suite of virtual tools and diagnostics that helps to feed protocols, practice, and choice-making in neonatal extensive care units (NICUs).
Current NICU feeding protocols are complex and must be tracked manually, which slows staffers down. Astarte’s product appears to automate the feeding protocols and use quantitative facts about preterm babies’ intestine fitness to deliver custom-designed care and vitamins.
Warren stated that their historical past in raising venture capital gave them the guidance they wished for constructing an enterprise from the floor up. “We had been marrying that revel in with an ardor we each share,” she said, alongside “being the first skilled venture institution to say ‘girls’ health is really worth it.’” The crew has become particularly interested in the demanding situations NICU caretakers face after assembly Katherine Gregory, a former NICU nurse who got her Ph.D. And come to be a professor and researcher of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. With her session, the crew advanced cloud-based total technology that facilitates decision-making and planning surrounding preemie care and feeding, normally with toddlers born beneath 34 weeks. While the pair had various revel in from one side of the fundraising stage, Warren stated they’ll be greater conservative than they had to be while fundraising for themselves, being cautious now not to overpromise and underdeliver.
“With fundraising, you have to place an exceptional lens on the enterprise,” she said. (Their $5 million puts them in the minority: In Philly, much less than a fifth of all VC dollars visit corporations founded with the aid of as a minimum one girl.) But the enterprise has grown: The crew moved to some office area in the Grist Mill in Yardley and goals to add two new roles — a software engineer and an enterprise analyst — to its seven-individual crew inside the near destiny. “We have genuinely benefited from the Philly community,” Warren stated. “We’ve been capable of rent here, get interns. Building an agency right here has been truly pleasantly sudden.”
