Some investors talk about healthcare from years of evaluating pitches or with the experience of an operator. Travis Manasco does this and more. 

He is a Partner at Solas BioVentures, a practising critical care physician, and someone who has already lived through the jump from clinician to founder himself. He completed medical school at Tulane, Emergency Medicine residency at Boston Medical Center, and Critical Care Medicine fellowship at Washington University, and still works at the bedside today. 

After fellowship, he invented a novel drug/device combination product and founded his own company. When that company was acquired by a development team at Bio54, he served as its Chief Medical Officer, helping advance his invention into Phase 2 clinical trials. 

He is still close to the pressure, the uncertainty, and the consequences that shape real patient outcomes and influence his decision-making every day. 

That comes through quickly when you speak to him. 

He talks about investing with the logic of a physician, but also with the memory of someone who learned entrepreneurship in real time. The through line is not a pure fascination with capital. It is a consistent interest in what really solves a patient’s problem, what can survive the journey from idea to adoption, and what kind of team can be trusted to carry that through. 

That makes him especially interesting at a moment when the categories themselves are becoming harder to underwrite neatly. Traditional MedTech, robotics, AI-enabled tools, neuromodulation, and BCIs do not all behave the same way, and Travis is clear that the investor lens cannot be the same either. Some businesses still fit the classic device playbook. Others do not. Some can be modelled on familiar timelines. Others need a very different level of patience, technical fluency, and operational judgement. 

Travis’s views as an investor are grounded in more than one world. He still sees patients. He has built a company. He now evaluates others trying to do the same. That gives him a more practical way of talking about unmet need, founder quality, workflow reality, and the difference between an interesting technology and one that has a real chance of becoming part of care. 

I started by asking him whether investing was ever part of the original plan. 

Origins 

Liz: Travis, when you look back, did you always imagine your career moving towards investing, or did that come much later? 

Travis: Much later. I did not set out thinking I would become an investor. I was focused on medicine. I was fascinated by biology, then I went through med school, residency, fellowship, and I really thought the path was straightforward. I was going to train, go to the bedside, and practise. 

What changed was I started seeing problems in a different way. When you are close to patients, particularly in acute care, you come up against situations where you are doing the best you can with the tools that exist, but you can also see where the gaps are. There are patterns with no answers. There are large unmet needs that no one is solving, or funding. And once you start noticing those gaps, it is hard to stop. 

Liz: What was the moment where that started to feel real to you? 

Travis: There was one patient encounter that really stayed with me. I was moonlighting in the ER very late at night, treating a man who had been bleeding from his scalp for hours. It was not catastrophic bleeding, but it had gone on and on, and I ended up using an older drug off-label in a new way to stop it. It worked. And afterwards, he asked if he could take it home with him. 

That was the moment that stuck with me. Not just because the drug had worked, but because his question exposed something bigger. I started thinking about why we were relying on an improvised use of an existing product to solve a problem that clearly came up in practice. Why was there not a better, purpose-built way to do this? That one question set everything else in motion. It was the first time I moved from thinking like a clinician managing the problem in front of me to thinking like an entrepreneur asking whether a better solution should exist in the first place. 

Liz: So you moved from treating the problem to trying to build around it. What was that period like? 

Travis: It felt like learning a second profession from scratch. It was during COVID, and I am an ICU physician. I was practising full-time in a pandemic and at the same time trying to understand company formation, fundraising, regulation, IP, management, all of it. I literally bought the “how to start a business” book. I asked for advice. A lot. I leaned on the people around me who knew more than I did. 

I was fortunate to be in RTP, North Carolina, where there is a strong ecosystem around biotech and entrepreneurship, and that helped significantly. But even with that support, it was still a huge learning curve. You realise very quickly that having a good idea is not the same as knowing how to build a company around it. 

Liz: What did that experience teach you that medicine had not? 

Travis: It taught me how many other things must go right before a good idea can actually help patients at scale. The idea is the easy part. In medicine, you are trained to assess the patient in front of you, make the best decision you can, and act. Frequently you make decisions with incomplete information. That part is similar to investing and entrepreneurship. But in company building, you also have to think about the clinical trials, funding, timing, regulation, commercialization, reimbursement, team building, all the things that determine whether a solution will ever make it out into the world. 

It also gave me a huge amount of respect and empathy for founders. Even when something is not a fit for us at Solas, I respect what it takes to put yourself out there and try to build. That is not easy. 

What makes this chapter interesting is that he did not step away from medicine in order to build. He did both. That matters, because it explains a lot about how he still thinks now. He did not learn entrepreneurship from a safe distance. He learned it while still carrying clinical responsibility, still working shifts, and still living inside the realities he was trying to improve. 

Liz: You were not building from outside the system. You were still practising while founding the company. What was that like in real terms? 

Travis: Intense. It was exciting, but it was intense. I was still working clinically, still picking up extra shifts, and at the same time trying to get this company off the ground. There was a practical side to it: making the bills work, making the time work, figuring out how you do both without dropping either. 

But there was also something energising about it. I was learning constantly. I was speaking to experts, asking for advice, trying to understand the funding world, the regulatory world, the operational side of building a company. It really did feel like taking on another qualification while still doing the first one full-time. 

Liz: What kept you going through that period? 

Travis: The impact. When I see patients, I can help the person in front of me. That is gratifying. But if we support a company that becomes a new standard of care, the scale is enormous. When you start building something, you begin to see the possibility that, if it works, it could help a lot more people than you will ever meet yourself. 

That was motivating. It was hard work, and there were definitely moments where I was just figuring it out as I went, but it was exciting too. I had gone from recognising a problem to trying to create something around it, and that gave the whole thing momentum. 

Liz: Did building while still in practice change the way you thought about risk? 

Travis: Yes, because when you are still taking care of patients, you do not really have the luxury of becoming too abstract. You are constantly switching between the immediacy of clinical decisions and the longer-term uncertainty of company building. That creates a certain discipline. It forces you to think not just about whether an idea is exciting, but whether it is viable, whether it fits into real care, whether it would actually make sense in the hands of the people using it. 

And I think that stayed with me. It is probably one of the reasons I still look at companies the way I do now. 

What followed was not a clean break from one world into another. If anything, his route into venture was shaped by the fact that he had already lived through the strain of trying to build something while still working in medicine. By the time he crossed paths with David Adair, Co-Founder of Solas BioVentures, he was not coming to investing as an outsider intrigued by startups. He was coming to it as someone who had already been through the first stretch of the journey himself. 

Solas BioVentures 

Liz: At what point did that move from building your own company into investing start to take shape? 

Travis: It really came through the process of building. I learned a lot going through that experience: raising money, putting the right people around the company, figuring out how to move an idea forward. And through that I met David Adair, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Solas BioVentures. 

David and I had, and have, a lot in common. He is a physician, founder, and investor, and he had also taken an old drug and found a new use for it, then gone through the process of building a company around that. 

So there was already a shared history and perspective there. 

We also shared a view that some parts of the country are underfunded relative to the quality of science and innovation coming out of them. They are over-scienced and underfunded. There is a lot of strong research happening across the country, but historically not always the same density of capital you see in places like Boston or the Bay Area. That gap creates real opportunity. 

Liz: What was it about David and Solas that felt right to you? 

Travis: I think it was partly the people and partly the philosophy. I liked the way David thought. The patient is always at the centre of our decisions at Solas, just like in medicine. I liked the way the team approached opportunities. And I liked the fact that Solas was willing to look seriously at areas, both geographically and by indication, that might be overlooked by others. 

There was a shared belief that there are a lot of good companies and a lot of good science in places that are not always the first places people look. That resonated with me. And because I had already lived some of the founder journey myself, I felt I could come into investing with a useful lens, not just around the opportunity, but around what it takes to build. 

Liz: You still practise. What has staying close to the bedside continued to give you? 

Travis: It keeps me grounded. That is the simplest answer. 

When you are still at the bedside, especially in the ICU, you are constantly reminded what is at stake. These are often the worst days of a patient’s life, and very often the worst days for their families too. You do not get to be theoretical about problems in that environment. You see them up close. 

That matters in investing because it changes how I hear pitches. If someone is working on something that targets a real unmet need, that tends to click very quickly for me. I can picture where it might fit, who might use it, what problem it is solving, and whether it feels meaningful. We spend a lot of time at Solas thinking first about the patient, and then about the clinician who is going to use the product. Staying in practice helps keep those two things connected. 

DOTE, GOAT, FLOAT, MOAT 

Liz: So when you look at a company now, what are you trying to understand first? 

Travis: We have an approach we use at Solas that I come back to a lot. We drill it into our analysts. It is DOTE, GOAT, FLOAT, MOAT. It is simple, but it works, because it forces you to break a company down logically. It also rhymes.  

The first is DOTE. Does it Offer Therapeutic Efficacy or meaningful utility? Does it solve a real problem? Is there an unmet need here, and is this solution genuinely better, or is it just another incremental change that sounds interesting on paper? For us, that is the first filter. If it is not making a meaningful difference, then it is very hard to build from there. 

Then there is GOAT, and that is really about the team. This is equally important. Even if it was green lights everywhere else, without the GOAT it is a very simple and quick no. 

It sounds obvious, but it matters enormously. Who are the leaders in this company? Are they coachable? Do they have grit? Will they chew glass? Can they take feedback? Will they stay the course when things get difficult? Because things will get tough. You are not investing only in the idea. You are investing in the people who are going to carry it through all the hard parts. 

We also look closely at character. Not just capability, character. How do these people behave? How do they treat others? How do they respond when they do not have the perfect answer? Those things matter more than people sometimes realise, because building a company is long, and it is hard, and you want to know who you are really backing. 

How do they speak with waiters, their support staff, their prior employees at other jobs? We watch it all. We observe how people behave when they think no one is watching.  

Then FLOAT. Does the business make sense financially? Can it sustain itself? What does the reimbursement picture look like? What does pricing look like? What do margins look like? Is there a path to building something sustainable that also generates a return? You can have something clinically exciting, but if the economics do not work, that is a real problem.  

And then MOAT. How do you protect it? In MedTech and biotech, that is often IP, patent life, regulatory barrier, defensibility. How hard is this going to be for somebody else to replicate? What is really protecting the business over time? Sometimes people talk about a moat as if it is only patents, but it can also be the complexity of the pathway, the clinical know-how, the depth of work needed to catch up. 

That is really the sequence. Does it matter? Who is building it? Can it work as a business? And how is it protected? If you keep coming back to those questions, it helps cut through a lot of noise. 

Liz: What strikes me listening to that is how disciplined the sequence is. You are not starting with excitement. You are starting with whether this is solving something meaningful, and then whether the people and the business can carry it. 

Travis: Exactly. Because there is always excitement. Founders are excited, scientists are excited, clinicians can get excited, investors can get excited. But excitement wanes. You need a way of thinking that brings you back to the fundamentals.  

And that is especially true in healthcare, because the stakes are higher. These are therapies, diagnostics, devices, tools that are going to affect real people, real patients, real systems. The bar should be high. 

Liz: Does that framework apply in the same way across everything you look at, or does it shift depending on whether you are looking at a device, a diagnostic, digital health, or something more complex? 

Travis: The broad logic holds, but the weighting changes. An IT or digital health play is different from a therapeutic. A diagnostic is different from a device. The questions underneath each bucket are not identical. But the overall structure still helps. You still want to know the same answers. 

What changes is the nature of the diligence. In some cases, you are spending more time on workflow. Sometimes you are looking at different indications or speaking with KOLs. We have a lot of in-house expertise, but we always want to look at a company from many different angles. 

Pitching: Avoidable Mistakes 

Liz: So where do founders most often make life harder for themselves? 

Travis: A lot of it comes down to avoidable errors. And I do not mean to be cold or harsh, because I really enjoy talking to founders. It is one of my favourite parts of the job. These are motivated, excited, hungry people trying to build something difficult. I respect that. But there are things that are very easy to get right, and when those things go wrong on a first call, it tells you more than founders sometimes realise. 

Show up on time. And really, on time is early. 

If we have a meeting, be ready before the meeting starts. Make sure the Zoom works. Make sure the materials are where they need to be. If you want to send a quick note the day before just confirming everything is still on, great. Love that.  That shows you are organised and on the ball. Sometimes you only have forty-five minutes or an hour. If the meeting starts off feeling sloppy when you are meant to be putting your best foot forward, that is not a great signal.  

The next thing is to understand who you are talking to. Founders should have looked at the fund, the website, the portfolio, the areas of interest. What kind of companies do we NOT invest in? Do we lead? What size cheques do we write? Where are we in the life of the fund? Those questions show experience. They show the founder understands this is not just about telling their story; it is also about understanding whether there is a fit. 

Then there is clarity. You need to know what you are asking for. How much are you raising? Why that amount? What does it get you to? What is the logic behind it? A lot of founders know they need capital, but they have not always sharpened the ask enough. And if the ask is fuzzy, it becomes much harder to have a serious conversation. 

Lack of focus is another common issue. Smart people, especially technical founders or scientists, can see lots of possible applications for what they are building. It could be used here, it could be used there, it could be a device, a diagnostic, a platform, something else. And some of that may be true. But in the early stages, that creates the opposite effect from the one they want. Instead of sounding expansive, it can sound unfocused.  I’m mentally doing the financial math in my head for each indication that is added.  

And then there is the pitch itself. It is not a thesis defence. It is not grand rounds. We want to understand the science, of course. A lot of us have scientific or clinical backgrounds. We care about whether it makes sense. But the job in that meeting is not to show us how much you know. It is to help us understand why this becomes a successful company and a successful product.  

Liz: What I am hearing is that founders can lose ground before the substance of the business has even really been discussed. 

Travis: Yes, exactly. And the thing is, a lot of that is fixable. That is the encouraging part. These are not always deep flaws in the company. Sometimes there are presentation problems, clarity problems, preparation problems. But first impressions matter. If you can make it easy for the investor to understand what you are building, why it matters, and what you need, you are already in a much stronger position. 

Liz: And when founders do get that right, how much of what follows is really about relationship-building over time? 

Travis: A lot of it. Venture is absolutely a relationship business. 

Of course, the company matters, the data matters, the market matters, all that matters. But this is a long game. You are deciding whether you want to spend years alongside a team, backing them through setbacks, pivots, pressure, and all the things that happen when you are trying to build in healthcare. So relationships matter a great deal. 

That is one of the reasons I think founders sometimes misunderstand what a first meeting is really for. Yes, you are introducing the company, but you are starting a relationship. You are giving the investor a sense of how you think, how you communicate, how you respond to questions, how you handle challenges. 

Relationships compound. We try to be a fast-no and a slow-yes. Many times a “no” is a “not right now.” We have definitely invested in companies where we passed and came back around to lead the next round. It happens more than you think.  

Liz: So it is much more of a long game than a single pitch meeting. 

Travis: Exactly. It is a long-term game. The best venture investors think of themselves as the ultimate long-term investors. I agree with that. 

The Ugly Baby  

Liz: When something is not right for Solas, how do you think about that conversation with a founder? 

Travis: It’s very similar to when I give bad news to a patient or their family. It is hard but overly optimistic prognoses hurt patients and families. The same is true for founders.  

Founders are proud of what they are building. They should be. They have put time, energy, reputation, and usually a lot of themselves into it. But sometimes what they have is not as differentiated as they think, or the indication is not the right one, or the market is more crowded than they realise, or we have seen something very similar already. Or maybe they are building something great and WE are wrong.  

Time is very valuable currency. We want to be honest rather than waste somebody’s time. So, if something is not for us, we try to say that clearly, respectfully, and in a timely way. And where we can, we try to be useful. That might mean pointing them towards a different indication, challenging the strategy, making an introduction, or helping them think more clearly about what would need to change. 

One of the parts of the job I enjoy most is seeing founders later who have taken that feedback, refined the idea, strengthened the company, and moved it forward. Sometimes that means another investor backs them. Sometimes it means they come back in a much stronger position. Either way, that is a good outcome. 

Liz: That is interesting, because it sounds as though even a no can still be part of moving a founder forward. 

Travis: Absolutely. Not every conversation ends in an investment. In fact, most don’t.  But that does not mean it cannot still be valuable. If you can help someone avoid wasting time, or help them sharpen the opportunity, that’s important. 

The best founders may not agree with every bit of feedback they hear, but they listen. They turn it over in their mind, compute it, and weigh it against their own experiences and judgement.  

AI in Healthcare 

Liz: You have also spent time looking closely at AI. What separates something genuinely useful from AI being added for the sake of it? 

Travis: For me, AI must solve a real clinical problem. That is the starting point. We are not interested in AI for the sake of AI. We are interested if it helps patients, helps providers, improves decisions, reduces inefficiency, or makes care more effective in a meaningful way. 

Medicine is an environment with huge amounts of information coming at you constantly. When AI is used well, it can help digest large volumes of data and surface relevant insights and patterns much faster than people could on their own. I see this when I practice. AI has already made physicians more efficient in their documentation or in their research of clinical problems. It is a really exciting time right now. AI is what electronic health records were supposed to be.  

The obvious attraction is time. If technology can take friction out of documentation, reduce administrative burden, or make it easier to find the right information at the right moment, to spot the needle in the haystack, or to confirm there is no needle at all, then that has very practical value. It means more time at the bedside, more attention where it matters, and less time lost to the system. 

It Is Not a New Coffee Machine 

Liz: I have spoken to many neurosurgeons and other surgeons, and KOLs who say they are instantly cautious when a non-clinician walks in with a new solution. They almost start by asking themselves, what is the catch? What do people outside medicine misunderstand about that reaction? 

Travis: I think many founders and CEOs misunderstand the reason for that caution. 

It is not about being obstructive. Physicians are trained to be skeptical. If you go back in history, there are plenty of examples. The medical establishment resisted Semmelweis on handwashing. They resisted Marshall on H. pylori causing ulcers. In both cases, the skeptics were wrong. But the instinct to question new claims before adopting them is deeply embedded in how we are trained, and most of the time it protects patients. 

It comes back to duty of care. We are ultimately accountable for the life and death of a patient. We are the ones who live with the consequences of our decisions. We are the ones looking patients and their families in their eye and delivering bad news.  

That is a heavy responsibility. 

It means you do not make decisions on a whim. It is not like trying out a new razor or coffee machine. Lives are at stake. I remember starting intern year and thinking to myself, wow, this is going to be four to seven years of training. Then after about three days I understood why. Because when you make mistakes, people die.  

When a new technology comes in, the question is not simply, is this interesting? It is: is it safe? Is it viable? How does it compare to what I already trust? What happens if it fails? How does it affect the patient in front of me? 

And in normal circumstances, the benchmark you are working against is the standard of care. That exists for a reason. We take an oath to give patients the best treatment we can. So if someone is asking a clinician to move away from what is already accepted and trusted, that is always going to be a serious ask. 

Liz: So if that caution is built in for good reason, how does a new technology begin to earn trust and displace the standard of care? 

Travis: Usually through people who are naturally curious. Early adopters. You will get clinicians like me who want to understand whether something new could make practice better, safer, more effective, more successful for patients. 

That is how it starts. You begin in a controlled way. You test it in the right setting. And then, if it does what it says it does, confidence builds and use gradually expands. Professional organizations notice and guidelines adapt.  

Each clinician has a different risk appetite, and each hospital does too. It has its own protocols, standards boards, ethics boards, and operating structures. Founders have to understand that they are not entering a vacuum. They are entering a system that is designed to protect patients, and that system typically moves carefully. 

One of the biggest mistakes founders make is speaking only to the most enthusiastic voices. KOLs are important, of course. They are often more curious, more open to change, more willing to explore something early. But they are not the whole market. 

If you really want to understand whether a solution can take off, you need to speak to the people in the middle. Talk to academic AND community physicians. You need input from the great scientists of the field but you also need input from the cardiologist who sees 30-50 patients in their clinic a day. The clinicians who represent the majority. The ones who are not against innovation, but who are not going to move just because something is new. 

Ask them directly: if this would not make you switch today, what is one change that might make you consider it? You learn a lot from that question. Probably more than you learn from talking only to people who were always going to say yes. 

And then there is workflow. Founders absolutely must think about workflow. Does this fit how care is delivered? Does it slow people down? Does it make the process harder? In medicine, and especially in acute settings or surgery, people do not have time to waste. The solution has to work within the existing reality of care or improve it enough to justify the disruption. 

And it is not just about the primary user. It is not just whether the surgeon likes it, or whether the radiologist likes it. It is also the team around them. If the nurses, techs, coordinators, or wider team find that it makes their work harder, it’s hard to get buy-in. That makes adoption harder. 

So yes, clinicians and procedural specialists can be cautious. But usually, it is not because they are trying to block progress. It is because the consequences and responsibility to the patient are real. 

The Investor Map Is Being Rewritten 

Liz: When you look at the investor landscape today, particularly in MedTech and neurotechnology, what feels different from a few years ago? 

Travis: I think the market is getting more honest about a few things at the same time. 

One thing is just the breadth of companies underneath “MedTech.” In a more conventional device company, investors can often map the journey in a familiar way. There is a clearer sense of the pathway, the milestones, the reimbursement logic, the commercial arc, and the timing around return. But with some of these newer categories, the story is much less linear. Some companies can get to market relatively quickly, but you still need to focus on driving efficiencies in workflow and adoption. 

The second thing the market is getting more honest about is the commercial reality of selling into healthcare. Hospitals are not hyperscalers. Revenue is capped by CMS and commercial reimbursement in the US. Costs are rising. Many procedures are migrating to ambulatory surgery centers. And the purchasing function is designed to start with “no.” A MedTech startup is asking a business running on low single-digit operating margins, under government-dictated rate increases of roughly 3 percent, to add cost to the system. You must have a very strong value proposition. Combine this with the regulatory environment and you have a very different selling environment than the rest of technology, and it changes how you should think about timelines, valuations, and milestones. I think there are a lot of graveyards of tech entrepreneurs trying to bust into healthcare because, paraphrasing Joe Weisenthal from the Odd Lots podcast here, they think we’re all laggards and we just need 20-year-old Stanford dropouts to come in and show us how it’s done. We’ll take all the talent we can get but it’s not that simple.  

This changes the underwriting framework. Many investors have moved later because there is inherent risk in the clinical trial and regulatory path. This creates opportunity for investors at the earlier stages, but the risk has to be calculated. You need grand slams to return capital to your LPs. Some investors are excellent at evaluating a traditional device business but less equipped to judge platform durability, systems integration risk, or the engineering difficulty of scaling something like robotics or AI. And many people in early-stage MedTech are not fully accounting for how constrained the healthcare buying environment really is. 

That does not make them bad investors. It just means not every excellent MedTech investor is automatically the right fit for every technology. 

THE HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS 

Liz: Can we unpack this a bit more from the founder angle? What does this mean for today’s founders? 

Travis: You are getting more of a split between the haves and the have-nots. The best companies are attracting a lot of attention, sometimes at very healthy valuations, while earlier or less clearly de-risked companies are finding it much harder to raise. The overall numbers can make the market look solid, but underneath that there is a lot of selectivity. 

It means a higher valuation now has to be earned much more clearly. Founders need stronger evidence, cleaner positioning, and a much more credible explanation of what gets proved next and why. The market is still funding good companies, but it is asking more of them before it rewards them. 

Liz: And what does it mean for investors? 

Travis: For later-stage investors, it can mean more competition for a smaller number of companies. For investors who come in earlier, it can create a very interesting setup, because if the market is thinner at Seed and Series A but strong companies still need capital, then you may have the chance to be more selective and build positions before valuations fully expand. It comes back to understanding where in the market you are operating and what kind of risk you are uniquely equipped to underwrite. 

Liz: I have certainly seen the split in neurotech between the haves and have-nots, as well as movement again in pricing and valuations. Is the market still as disciplined as it feels? 

Travis: I think it is selective. Strong companies, especially those with real differentiation, clear evidence plans, and a credible path through the next set of milestones, can still command very strong attention and strong pricing. But that does not mean the whole market has gone back to where it was a few years ago. 

What we are seeing is more concentration. Capital is flowing into fewer companies, often in larger rounds, and often into higher-conviction names. Valuations can move up for the best assets, but it is not a broad reopening of the market. It is a more selective environment. 

That means founders need to be careful, especially with higher early-stage valuations. We all love large numbers, but if the valuation is not matched to what the business really needs to prove next, it can create problems later. And for investors, it means you have to be very clear about why something deserves the price it is getting. 

Liz: Does that also mean valuations are starting to move again, or is that too simple a reading of it? 

Travis: I think the answer is yes, but selectively. I would not describe it as a broad return to the kind of market we saw a few years ago where almost everything felt inflated. 

What is happening now is that the stronger, more mature companies and the companies that are easier to underwrite are getting rewarded. You are seeing larger rounds and stronger pricing for a smaller number of businesses, rather than a universal lift across the whole market. 

Capital is concentrating. Investors are putting more money into fewer companies, and that naturally supports higher valuations for the perceived winners. If a company looks closer to technical proof, clinical proof, commercial readiness, reimbursement clarity, or strategic value, it is easier for investors to justify paying up. If it does not, the market feels pretty disciplined. 

Looking Ahead: 2026 

Liz: What will be your measures of success personally for 2026, and from a Solas BioVentures perspective, what will a great 2026 look like? 

Travis: We measure our success around patient impact. Success for Solas means the companies we back are meaningfully improving patient lives. We have multiple portfolio companies with significant catalysts in the next six to twelve months. There will be wins and setbacks. We target a lot of unmet needs, so the scoreboard for us is positive trials, device and drug approvals, and relentless portfolio company support. 

We are grateful to our founders for what they are attempting. They are the ones in the arena. We try to be a mix of coach and agent. We want to help them build great companies. We work hard to open doors, make connections, and put them in the best position to succeed. 

Internally, we want our people to grow. We want them to learn and develop through a culture of excellence and service to others. If our team is better on December 31st than they were on January 1st, that is a win. 

Liz: And for a MedTech and a neurotech angle, what would make 2026 an incredible year? What would you hope to see? 

Travis: I think an incredible year would be one where we see continued evidence of real translation and adoption. For that, you need excellent data. Adoption follows data.  

In MedTech, I think we will see broader introduction of AI into the many different avenues of the patient pathway. We are seeing companies with impressive AI features that make difficult procedures easier.  

The key word is augmentation. We are not replacing physicians. We are giving them superpowers. 

I also think you are going to see more devices make subjective measurements objective. The more objective data we have, the better we can treat patients. Right now, too much of medicine is “how do you feel?” instead of “here is what the data says.” Let’s be real, life is not always black and white. There’s plenty of room for the subjective grey. But the more clarity we can bring to the pathology, the better. This is true for both Neurotech and the entire MedTech market.  

More broadly, I hope to see capital continue to find it 

s way into great companies. Truly revolutionary technology will get funded and advance. But the funding environment will not meaningfully shift until the exit environment does. Capital follows returns. How do you return money? You IPO or you get acquired. Those are your two doors. So, a great 2026 would also be one where we start to see continued movement on the exit side, because that unlocks capital for the next generation of companies. 

The Ecosystem 

Liz: To wrap up, Travis: if the MedTech ecosystem worked more effectively together, not just founders and CEOs but the systems around them, the clinicians, the investors, the operators, the institutions, what do you think we could unlock that we are not unlocking today? 

Travis: I think you could unlock more problems that deserve to be fixed. There are a lot of smart, driven people on both sides of healthcare, in private industry and on the clinical side, who want to solve real problems. The question is whether the ecosystem around them makes that easier or harder. 

It starts with grants and governments funding basic science and university research. A lot of great science comes out of that funding. But usually, it is nowhere near a complete product. It’s when expertise collides where you get something exciting. 

Academic expertise, industry knowledge, and financial discipline, brought together early, can turn promising science into real products. You need the brilliant ideas, but you also need the next person or the next team asking: How do we pay for that? Is that going to contribute enough value for the hospital? For the payor? Why would someone use this over the standard of care? 

When you have those conversations openly and transparently, the clinical need, the business case, and the capital can all line up. That’s when something genuinely powerful happens. And then we, most importantly the patients, all win. 

For informational purposes only. Solas BioVentures Management, LLC (“Solas”) is an SEC-registered investment adviser. For more information on Solas, visit https://adviserinfo.sec.gov/firm/summary/322344. 

 

Do You Want to Be Featured?

If you are a CEO or Co-Founder, and would like to be featured within my Leader In The Spotlight NeuroTech, please reach out to me.

Are you a VC, FO, KOL, researcher, or clinician with a specialist interest in NeuroTech – then please also get in touch, as I want to have a well rounded perspective. 

Thank you.

Understanding The Brain- The Ultimate Frontier. 

 

About the author

Liz is our Principal Consultant at Cruxx, covering neurotechnology markets. She is a very well liked, inisghtful, highly connected and respected, champion of start-ups and the people within them. She is unique.

Passionate and energetic, she is driven by finding the best talent today, for the healthcare technology of tomorrow.

She works globally,  building impactful teams and headhunting unique talent for start-ups and VCs pushing the frontiers of medical innovation and technology.

If you are growing your team reach out. She specialises in trans-atlantic team builds, USA, Europe and wider.  

From R&D, clinical and regulatory to C-suite and Board level, Liz is exceptional and relentless at sourcing visionary, talented individuals for our clients.