An Irish entrepreneur has decided to stray from his normal playing field of telecommunications to invest in a startup medical device company after becoming impressed by its management team, Ireland’s The Sunday Business Post reported over the weekend.
Sean Melly, founder of an Irish telecommunications firm called Etel, has made a “multimillion euro investment” in Vasorum, a Dublin-based company developing an implant to close arteries after cardiac surgery. The market for such devices, according to the company, will be worth $1 billion by 2010.
Melly tells the Post that it was the company’s management team that inspired him to invest. “‘It is not every day you stumble across a team that is set up and ready to go,” he says. “They had done a lot of advance work – they knew their sector, they knew the design they wanted and they knew the roadmap for the company.”
The exact amount of this first-round funding, which will go toward animal and human trials for the implant, was not disclosed. But Melly hinted at the amount, when he told the Post, “To get this one product to human trials will cost about €5 million. We have copper fastened that and are comfortable raising more money if we need to.”