Bruce Kehr, CEO of Rockville, MD-based InforMedix, thinks private placement funding is worth the wait. The neuropsychiatrist turned CEO recently explained to the Washington Business Journal his company’s strategy of sticking with private placements over convertible debt. In an article that ran on Friday, Kehr tells the Journal, “If you’re in the medical device and life sciences business, you never know when those key milestones are going to be hit.” But private placement, he explains, “doesn’t carry that onus that if we hiccup we’re dead.”
InforMedix, which makes the Med-eMonitor System for tracking medication compliance, has held six private placement rounds since its inception in 2003. Still, it finished 2006 with a capital deficit of $1.9 million, according to the Journal, which says InforMedix’s situation is a typical example of “the day-to-day trials of many young biotech and medical device companies to keep their science on the lab tables.”
Although other funding routes may have brought in quicker money, Kehr has chosen to wait it out, confident in his company’s product, whose sales in 2006 ($103,000), according to the Journal, were five times what they were in 2005. “We really believe we’ve hit a very exciting inflection point,” Kehr tells the paper.