Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Designing Your Device for Adoption: Interview with InfoBionic CEO Stuart Long

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Stuart Long, CEO of InfoBionic. InfoBionic's virtual cardiac telemetry platform, MoMe ARC®, brings together a tiered hospital-grade monitoring capability powered by advanced AI-enabled analysis for cardiac interventions.Stuart has over two decades of experience in the medical device and healthcare technology sectors, with a focus on driving rapid commercial growth. His leadership spans roles including CEO of Monarch Medical Systems, global chief marketing and sales officer at CapsuleTech, and executive positions at Philips Healthcare, Agfa HealthCare, AMICAS, and FUJIFILM USA. At CapsuleTech, he developed strategic initiatives that led to the company’s acquisition by Qualcomm Life. In this interview, Stuart shares insights on combining debt and equity financing, hybrid commercial approaches, and positioning startups for acquisitions through adjacent market development — all while maintaining the persistence needed to survive the long game.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device and health technology founders and CEOs, and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.Second, if you want to peek behind the curtain of the world's most successful startups, you should consider a Medsider premium membership. You’ll learn the strategies and tactics that founders and CEOs use to build and grow companies like Silk Road Medical, AliveCor, Shockwave Medical, and hundreds more!We recently introduced some fantastic additions exclusively for Medsider premium members, including playbooks, which are curated collections of our top Medsider interviews on key topics like capital fundraising and risk mitigation, and 3 packages that will help you make use of our database of 750+ life science investors more efficiently for your fundraise and help you discover your next medical device or health technology investor!In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members also get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost, including the latest Medsider Mentors Volume VII. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, if you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Stuart Long.

I heard a doctor say once, I can't swing a dead cat and not hit 10 cardiac reps in my office. So it's a really crowded space. So how do you rise above and get attention, right? And so when you don't have a product problem, but you have a channel problem, you have to diversify. You got to really think about how can you be where the customer's making a decision. Welcome to Medsider, where you can learn from the brightest founders and CEOs in medical devices and health technology. Join tens of thousands of ambitious doers as we unpack the insights, tactics, and secrets

behind the most successful life science startups in the world. Now, here's your host, Scott Nelson. Hey, everyone, it's Scott. In this episode of MedSider sat down with Stuart Long, CEO of Infoionic. He's held the role since March of 2017, bringing more than two decades of experience in the medical device and health technology sectors. Stewart's previous leadership roles included CEO of Mono, Unarch Medical Systems, Global Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at Capsule Tech, which sold to Qualcomm Life,

and executive positions at Phillips Healthcare, Fuji Film, and others. Here, a few of the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, maximize funding efficiency through creative capital strategies that prioritize non-dilutive options. Stewart's approach combines venture debt with equity financing and treating equity as prime real estate to be carefully preserved. He emphasizes finding investors willing to fight the good fight during challenging periods, noting that favorable terms mean nothing if investors abandon you when difficulties arise.

Second, win in crowded markets with a multi-pronged sales approach. Leveraging diverse channels from direct reps to independent partners and strategic distributors helps startups build trust, gain traction, and maintain optionality where traditional methods fall short. Third, structure your startup for premium valuations by combining growth with strategic adjacencies. Stewart's formula focuses on achieving year-over-year revenue growth of 30 to 50% while simultaneously, developing products that open new addressable markets for strategic acquires, transforming strong financial performance into premium valuations through strategic portfolio development.

All right, before we dive into this episode, I'm pumped to share that volume 7 of Medsider Mentors is now live. This latest edition highlights key takeaways from recent Medsider interviews with incredible entrepreneurs like Bill Hunter, CEO of Canary Medical, Brian Lord, CEO of Pristine Surgical, Don Crawford, co-founder of Safion and current CEO of Corvista Health, and other proven MedTech founders and CEOs. Look, we get it. Keeping up with every Medsider interview isn't easy. That's why we created Medsider mentors. These ebook volumes distill the best practices and insider secrets from top founders and CEOs, all in a downloadable, easy-to-digest format.

To check the latest volume out, head over to Medsider Radio.com forward slash mentors. Premium members get free access to all past and future volumes, plus a treasure trove of other resources. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. We recently revamped Medsider with banking new features, especially for our premium members. In addition to every volume of Medsider mentors, you'll get full access to our entire interview library dating back to 2010. You'll also get Medsider Playbooks, curated guides packed with actionable insights and topics like fundraising, regulatory challenges, reimbursement strategies, and more. And if you're fundraising, don't miss our exclusive investor database featuring over 750 life science BCs, family offices, and angels. We've even

created three custom packages to help you with your next fundraise. Learn more about Medsider mentors and our premium memberships by visiting MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. All right, without further ado, let's dive in in the interview. All right, Stuart, welcome to MetSide Radio. I appreciate you coming on. Oh, great to be here. Thanks for having me. The folks are largely listening to this, but I'm looking at your video and you've got a great

picture in the background. I love it. I took that picture, by the way. Yeah. Oh, did you? Awesome. Yeah. One of my business partners is Brady Hatcher.

And like throughout his whole facility, it's like artwork that's kind of similar to this, but he took it all, right? Yeah. kind of cool. So I totally get the vibe. So with that said, I recorded a very short bio at the outside of this interview. But let's start there. If you can give us like a, you know, one to two minute overview of your background, kind of leaning up to InfoBionic. Yeah, no problem. Yeah. So I've been in and around the business for about 30 years now. I know I look like I should only have been here for five. But no, I just joking. I started out on the clinical side. So I really kind of

cut my teeth and I was running a non-invasive cardiology lab for a hospital down in Florida and we implemented some first of kind technology and I liked it so much I ended up going to work for the company who built that and so that that was one of the first systems that did cardiac loops digitally versus putting things on videotape so that spawned a long track record of doing a lot of first so moving from film to digital from manual calculates. for insulin dosing to using advanced mathematics. I think it was AI before they called it AI. And then we got here today where we were the first cloud-based solution

that did cardiac monitoring in the cloud and used deep learning to assess the signals so that we could improve accuracy. So been around for a long time. Been through a lot of different positions, a lot of different ologies, but certainly I grew up with my mom as a nurse, so I grew up doing home health visits with us. with her. So always have had an altruistic motive behind the scene. So it's good to be in a place

where we are today, especially where we're helping people, you know, improve their health or find stuff early enough so that it helps them. You and me both in terms of our moms being nurses, right? I think it's a little bit easier to, or a little bit smoother transition to kind of into the world device, right? It's hit home a little bit different way. So that's cool. I mean, we'll link to your LinkedIn profile in the full write-up on MedSider. For those that are listening, you want to learn a little bit more because you've got a pretty story, pretty story. career, right, leading up to up to this point. So it's pretty cool to see. So let's talk a little bit before we kind of go too deep into the interview. Let's talk a little bit about the MoMe

arc system, right, which is, you know, you're kind of your core platform at your biotic. So give us the sense for maybe what it is and like the core kind of problem or area that you're trying to improve upon. Yeah. So I mean, maybe just kind of a throwback to how the company was founded, right so a gentleman who's founded the first electrophysiology lab in new england you know when monitoring came around it ultimately got to the point where he thought there just had to be a better way you had multiple different devices for individual tests you had different you know even fax machines you get a different facts report or when it finally went electronic you had different logins very difficult to adjudicate or you know try to correct a report after the fact and he just thought there there's got to be a better way

to do this. So the idea was try to get everything on to a single device, single platform, single sign on, you know, more of the kind of the one hand to shake, if you will, versus multiple different vendors. And try to use some assemblance of technology to make it more efficient to read because, you know, you can produce over 100,000 heartbeats a day. You wear that for 10 or 20 or 30 days. You're talking millions of heartbeats. So how can the doctors get to what matters the most, you know, get to the heart of it, pun intended, as fast as possible. And our job is to find the problem so doctors can intervene or introduce a therapy. So the idea was that we created a device that does really only one kind of monitoring.

And based on the CPT code that insurance covers, we would generate a report that meets the requirements for that. We're able to diagnose arrhythmias for physicians or give them the tools to make the ultimate diagnose and sign off on that. And we do that pretty quickly. Very, very efficiently, we were able to stream the data, you know, off the body directly to the clinicians pretty quickly. And then, you know, when we first came to market, we could do it faster than everybody else because, you know, it was a new and novel way and allowed doctors to be able to get to the treatment and the therapy much faster.

And the patients love it because they were like, you know, I didn't have to wait a month to get my results back. They got them back in 24 hours in some point in some cases. Or they got a call and said, go to the hospital. or, you know, nothing happened and they said you're perfectly fine, right? So the patients really accepted the idea that this ability to get information in what probably became more standard, people were used to having their watches on and things continuously monitoring. And so, yeah, so that's what we do. That's, we're able to get information off the body about your heart,

diagnose the arrhythmia's and let the doctors intervene quicker and more accurately than they had historically done. That's helpful overview. And infobionic.a.ai is the is the website. We'll link to it again in the full write-up on MedSiter, but it's just as it sounds. Info-Bionic.a-I, you can definitely check out the technology in a little bit more detail. But just as a follow-up, you're obviously supplying the hardware, right, that diagnoses these various arrhythmias. Are you also like, is it the full kind of closed-loop system as well? I mean, you're providing like the software that, you know, physicians will use to, you know, to see the various diagnoses and, you know.

It is. Yeah, it's, you know, call it soup to nuts, if you will. Okay. So what happens is a patient if they're feeling like they might have some symptoms and, you know, given the prevalence of cardiovascular disease, almost everybody I talk to, if they've not had some issue, they know somebody or somebody that's been in their family. But if you're having some kind of symptoms that caused you to call your doctor and say it's a general practitioner and the general practitioner says, well, that sounds like that might be cardiac. Let's make a referral to a cardiologist. Then you talk to the doctor and you can do these over the phone now, a virtual health visit, or you can go see them directly in the office. And if the indications are there and it meets the requirements that the insurers require,

they'll order the device. So we manufacture the device, so the device goes on the patient, we manufacture all the software, we build all the AI internally, all of its FDA approved, of course. we're able to then provide the results to the clinicians, whether those are doctors, you know, general practitioners, nurses, you know, anybody who's caring for that patient. They make their determination on what the next step should be and tends to be a really efficient process. So yeah, we do it from A to Z, if you will. Got it. We're recording this in, let's call it early Q2 of 25 for those listening, maybe listening

after the fact, right? Six, nine, 12 months down the road. Sure. Give us a sense for where the company's at today, right, in terms of it's a kind of lifecycle. Yeah, sure. So we started the business. We commercially launched in Q4 of 2016. So we've been in market now just a little over eight years. We've got hundreds of customers and thousands of devices in the market. We're generally not specific about how many, but we've got a great footprint. We were the company that introduced a brand new model that kind of shaped where the market tends to be today. The fact that we were cloud-based and we could use some AI. to get really good results caused a shift in the market. So the good news is today there's

there's really not a bad cardiac monitor. So we feel good about where we were able to kind of drive the market. We did introduce a new way of doing things. Typically a doctor's office or a hospital would outsource the service to a third party. The third party would manage all the logistics with the device getting it to and from the patient and do all the billing for that. and then the doctors would bill for a much smaller component of that just for writing the prescription. So we introduced a way for the doctors to actually take ownership or control of the devices and do all the work themselves. You know, it used to be that outsourcing was the right way to do it because it was a lot of work. We built a fairly efficient system so that doctors could do that and they could do the billing themselves.

So we were able to shift 100% of the reimbursement back to the physicians and they were able to provide a high quality service. and be remunerated for that service that they could provide. So that shifted the market again. And we saw a lot of the competitors follow suit in terms of the model. But still people outsource it quite a bit. There's a lot of folks who just don't want to have to deal with it. They don't want to do that work. And so we have that same, you know, we can outsource it.

We can take on the full service for the customers. Or we can supply the devices and they can do it themselves. Got it. Yeah, I've been in market for quite some time. a fairly good footprint in the market. And I think probably one, you know, a great way to kind of put a stake in the ground and where we landed is we've collaborated with Mayo Clinic where they use us, you know, in all of their facilities.

And they're an investor in the company. So we've put ourselves on the map, I think, in terms of quality and innovation. I want to circle back around to that comment here later on later in the interview because I think that's that synergistic investment, right? It is the ideal scenario, I think, for a lot of us, right? In the world of startups. But that's a super helpful overview. And I guess one other follow-up question when thinking about kind of how the landscape

has changed. And you mentioned physicians are now able to bring this sort of this technology right in-house. Is that the overwhelming majority of how your customers are adopting, you know, your technologies? They are in fact bringing it in-house versus kind of the legacy model of outsourcing? If you look at the market, you know, between hospital systems and then physician practices, When you look at the physician practices that are independent, not hospital owned, it represents about 25% of the tests that are done in the market, so a relatively small portion. That segment of the market, when they're independent and they're fighting to stay alive and

keep their businesses with lots of pressure on profit margins and so forth, and demand for patient continues to go up at the shortage in doctors and physicians, the ability to own and operate the model works very well in that space. We only see it in the hospital space where again about 75% of the tests are generated from about 10% of the hospitals own and operate the devices given just the complexity of their environments. It's very difficult for them to take on additional services. They're already pretty stressed for resources. So it's just easier for them to continue to outsource it. So I think we're seeing a shift on the hospital space, more people taking it on, for example. Mayo Clinic, as I mentioned, a great example of that.

And our hospital-based customer-based grows pretty substantially year-over-year. So I think in time, we'll see it to be a bigger chunk of that. But I don't think the outsource model will ever go away just because a lot of facilities just don't have the time or the resources to do it, just given the pressures of how they operate business and how health co-works. Yeah, it makes sense. And the reason I kind of want to, I wanted to bring that up, or at least ask the follow-up question is because I think it's super smart, right,

as a, you know, I'm going to call it InfoBionica startup, even though, you know, you've got eight years under your belt of commercial kind of being commercial. But it's super smart to have both options, right, to be able to service, right, that sort of that owned market, if you will, right? But yet still be able to kind of offer sort of a full service, you know, sort of platform to hospitals. So I think it's super smart. And then the other thing, too, is, you know, if you're, if you're listening to this and your startup, and you're not thinking about, like, plays that where you can almost empower physicians, right, not only empower them with better technology, but empower them with more of a better economic model,

oftentimes you'll see very quick adoption, right, in that case. And I think that's really sharp. And if you're early into your startup idea, you should be thinking about that sort of landscape and how you're doing. Yeah, I think the key we learned is you have to be able to sell it the way the customer wants to buy it. Even if we think that one way is better over the other one,

At the end of the day, the customers, you know, that adage, the customer is always right. However, they want to buy it and own and operate it. But you still need to be able to provide that high level quality of service, the innovation that they're looking for. And we found all sorts of interesting ways of efficiency, right? So if you can remember back when we didn't have cell phones, right, and you would travel all day long and, you know, and work, and you'd get at the end of the day, you'd have to catch up on your emails and it was all this extra time. that still happens in this particular ology. And I've heard stories from our customers where their colleagues, they're riding the same train home. They live in the city and their colleagues at the end of the day are pulling out their ECG reports on the train and going through and looking at them on paper.

Whereas in a model where we're constantly communicating and they're able to see it and they get the alerts on their phones as it occurs during the day, no different than you get your emails and you deal with all that stuff during the day. you don't have to wait till the end of the day. So there's a big efficiency gain. And we can do that in either model. I think to your point, it's like being thoughtful about, you know, you want to be able to provide it the way the customers want to buy. But regardless of how they buy it, you still want to provide that value at those services and efficiency and equality.

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, we have kind of a similar, a very similar view at Fastway, which is the company that I'm running. We're working on two different energy platforms in the IVL intravascular lithotropsy space or IVL space. one of the more common questions you get is why are you doing both, right? Well, there's a number of reasons, but one of which it does gives us kind of unique optionality to service a different side of care, whose needs are different. So I like the play. But with that said, again, for everyone listening,

Infobionic is the website, infobionic.AI, I should say, is the websites. We'll link to it in the full write-up on MedSider, but again, infobionic.a. If you want to learn a little bit more about the company and the technology and kind of their story. So with that said, Stuart, let's go back in time, learn a little bit more about kind of the journey getting up to, you know, kind of early, early 25 here. So you mentioned that you've been at the helm, I think eight years now, is it, right? Or maybe a little bit over. Just a little bit over, yeah. A little bit over eight years. I'm sure when you first joined the company, you know, and took on the CEO role, the MoMA system didn't, didn't look like it is today, right? So or probably, you know, have made a number of

different improvements since then. So when you think about those earlier days in a startup, right, and maybe think about even your previous startup experience, because you've got a lot of sort of swings at the plate. What do you think is most crucial for startup kind of founders, CEOs to think about when they're trying to move quickly through those early development phases, but often have like very limited kind of resources and capital to work with? Yeah, it's a great question. And I don't think any startup's immune. I mean, I mean, you do get the unicorn, right, where the market just kind of takes off. And, you know, but I actually read something very interesting where, the interview with a, you know, a premier venture capitalist. And they said, yeah, we, we won't

hire anybody that's had a successful run on their first run, right? They, they, you know, because they want people who have had to work for it, right, and go through the mistakes, because that's how most of the companies go through it. And it's challenging, it's difficult. You know, it's generally going to take twice as long, cost twice as much, right, than, than you ever planned for. You know, so I think, you know, for us, you know, we experience all of those things, right? I mean, I think the adage that a ship in the harbor is, you know, that's not what it's meant to do. It's meant to be at sea, right? So rough seas make for skillful sailors. And that's what, you know, startups are like. It's, there's always something. And, you know, we certainly had our own headwinds. We brought a novel model to market.

It became an existential threat to all of the existing incumbent vendors in the space because it threatened their model. So, you know, we had people try to sue us. And, you know, to spend a lot of money. And so we ended up ultimately winning on all of those things. But we spent, you know, tens of millions of dollars defending ourselves, you know, only in the end to be right. And looking back, you know, what could we have done with tens of millions of dollars on new product, right? So it certainly had certainly had its effect. You know, but I think the concept of perseverance is in, you know, staying committed to your cause, if you know, it's the right thing. I mean, we were clearly able to demonstrate early on.

that people were willing to purchase and adopt the system. We saw great adoption when it went in, and then once it went in, 40% of the growth came from the existing customer base, and that still holds true today. So we know it's a good technology. We know that when it goes in, it's nice and sticky, has a lot of value.

So that allowed us to say, okay, when the things, you know, when the tough got going, you know, we had to get going tough, right? And so, but we knew that our model was there, and so we persisted. And so we had to find investors that were willing to fight the good fight with us, which is really hard to do. There's not a lot of investors that want to get into the fight when you don't know what the outcome is ultimately going to be. So that persistence and really having a good team around you, right?

So we had a really committed team of folks that stayed through the really tough times. And so we were able to persevere and then we ran into the pandemic also, right? So you kind of get these double whammies. But along all of those, we had key wins, you know, very large-scale adoption by, you know, preeminent health systems in the marketplace. And it always told us that we had the right calculus. And, you know, we needed time and effort, you know, to be able to play that out. And so here we are eight years later. You know, are we at the projections that we thought we'd be when we first started out?

And you know, you think you're going to be a hundred million dollar company in three years. we're well on our way, but certainly, you know, it takes time and it takes a lot of effort. But we've crossed all the bridges. We feel great now. We've got a lot of wind in our sales. The growth is there. We've got a phenomenal, you know, record year coming off last year. So I feel good about it.

So I think, you know, the biggest advice is perseverance, making sure you have the right team around you, you know, making sure that you're, what it is you're doing is you can continually test and validate. It's the right strategy. Otherwise, you need to pivot. It's constantly testing to pivot or persevere. And we found that we could persevere. Didn't have to do a lot of pivoting. We just had to find the right mix of investors and team to want to fight that good fight.

And we've done that. And now everybody's starting to reap the rewards. And we're pretty pleased that we punched through. So easy, right, looking back. Yeah, hindsight 2020. Exactly. But joking aside, you mentioned a couple things, right? I mean, perseverance being one of them.

And so many founders and CEOs that come on the program do echo that sentiment, right? Like that's just, that is part of the startup game, right? You're undoubtedly going to encounter fire drills, maybe on a daily basis that need to be addressed. But, you know, your comment about, you know, a ship in the harbor is meant for sailing. I haven't heard that analogy before, but it's a great one. It kind of reminds me of the similar comment that Mike Deneen made. I had him on the program maybe a month or two ago. He's running to yoga medical, which is a artogovascular, Tioga medical.

I can remember exactly. But anyway, so she from that company. I don't know if you know Mike, but he mentioned something similar, right? Like when you're in these early stages, it always feels comfortable to like get into a cadaver or get into a study, right? Because you don't feel like your technology's there yet or you need to make one more tweak or one more refinement. And, you know, your analogy of like, look, we got to push it out to the seas at some point.

You know what I mean? It's going to be a puppy. You know, there's going to be some waves. But we got to do it. And that's going to make us stronger. And so I think that's just a, you know, really, really good valuable advice. I guess the other thing too that you touched on is team and having the right team around you, including investors.

And I couldn't agree more to have investors, even if it means maybe not the most ideal terms, right? But if they're going to be around, right? And willing to fight alongside you, that can often have much, much more significant impact, right, than the best, you know, the best, you know, the best, you know, on a term sheet. So I think that's really important for those that are considering, considering their next capital raise is don't, you know. Yeah. I couldn't agree more on the sentiment of sometimes it's not the best terms, but it allows you to continue to stay in the game.

And if you stay in the game and you're successful, you can always put new terms in place later, right? You can, lots of ways to do that. And that's, you know, the gymnastics you can do in venture capital is, you know, it has a pretty wide swath of creative ways to finance and recover, you know, even if you don't have, you know, such good terms on a particular deal. But it's all about staying in the game, doing whatever it takes to fight, you know, especially when you're committed to your cause, you know, it's working. Because we knew people were buying it. People loved it when it went in. You know, our MPS scores were absolutely fantastic.

You know, we had, you know, world class commentary from our customers. You know, everybody told us, you know, our technology was the best. So we knew we had something. So we never gave up. And so we figured out a way to survive and ultimately get into a position where your, your strength, you're over your growth there, the revenue's there, profitability, cash is good, all those things are working, customers are happy. Now you've got some leverage to go and renegotiate terms. And then if you can get to that point, then it's a good position to be in. And so you're,

I think you're absolutely right. But, you know, staying in the game is the key. Yeah, no doubt. Hey there, it's Scott. And thanks for listening in so far. The rest of this conversation is only available via our private podcast for MedSider premium members. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. Here's why. First, MediSy Premium members get access to every single interview dating back to 2010. That's over 200 episodes packed with expert insights from proven founders and CEOs. Second, premium members also get free access to Medsider Playbooks. These are thematic collections of hard-won insights covering topics like fundraising, risk

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