Seedling Enterprises - Background
Seedling Enterprises was formed in 1999 to address the serious need at the time for very early stage capital to support medical device development. Created by John Cvinar, Josh Tolkoff and Andy Levine, Seedling was capitalized with $3.4 million in a limited liability partnership. The partnership consisted of high net worth individuals (including many prominent medical device executives and venture capitalists) the managing partners John, Josh and Andy as well as ACT Medical - a medical device outsourcing company in Watertown, MA. (http://www.allbusiness.com)

Operations began in 2000 and Seedling was soon overwhelmed with a constant flow of wonderful ideas from the medical, scientific and engineering establishments in Boston and across the country. Relationships were quickly built with several medical and teaching institutions in Boston as Seedling became a new partner in exploring opportunities to advance medical device technology. During its thirty two month existence, Seedling reviewed over four hundred new ideas and in most cases met with the inventors or entrepreneur(s) involved. Seedling soon built a reputation for its honest, forthright, timely assessments and its assistance in moving along or stopping projects. (http://www.catalysthealthventures.com)

The Seedling Enterprises business model was quite different that conventional seed funding options then in existence. Seedling was not just a source for capital but rather provided a complete package of engineering, clinical, regulatory, and business expertise. Once a project was committed to, it was literally moved into Seedling where: devices were built with the support of ACT Medical, proof of principle testing conducted, pre-clinical experiments performed, regulatory documents submitted and markets analyzed. As each committed project moved past various pre-determined milestones, analyses were made as continuation and likely outcome. Over the course of its existence, Seedling performed significant technical and market research in over fifty new opportunities and ultimately invested in seven projects. Three of these projects became companies including Angstrom Medica, GI Dynamics and LumeRx. Three projects became technology developments that were eventually licensed and have since become major product lines for their corporate acquirers. Finally, one project was abandoned due to inability to excite sufficient licensing interest.

In 2003, Seedling Enterprises exhausted the capital in its fund and discontinued active operations seeking device ideas and opportunities. Today, the fund administers the Seedling assets of its owners including continuing royalty payments and the equity ownership in its three companies. The fund annually disburses income received from royalty payments and provides its members investment access to its three developing companies. There has been one company liquidity event with the sale of Angstrom Medica (see announcements) to Pioneer Surgical.