“Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming,” reads the quote under the framed picture of David Bowie that adorns the boardroom — also known as the Bowie room — of OneProjects’ office in Clonskeagh, south Dublin. Trite though it might seem for something as prosaic as a medical device start-up to have named a meeting room after one of the great artists of the 20th century, for OneProjects founders — Dublin native Fionn Lahart, who serves as chief executive, and German-born chief technical officer Christoph Hennersperger — there is something arguably apt about the choice.
Bowie’s career and his output, after all, were defined by his preternatural ability to synthesise past and present in a way that often seemed to predict the future. And predicting the future is certainly part of Lahart’s and Hennersperger’s job.
“The medical field, medical science, medical understanding,” says Lahart, “is constantly changing. And we need to be able to adapt to that.” The business partners, friends and self-described “work married couple” have just returned from a clinical conference in Boston: Lahart to the Bowie room in Clonskeagh; Hennersperger to Munich, where he lives and heads up OneProjects’ German office and is joining in via Microsoft Teams on a mild February day in Dublin.
When it comes to publicising their efforts, ‘we’ve been very stealthy’, says Lahart
Personable, friendly but perhaps a little careful in their interactions with the media, the co-founders are being forced out of their shells by success. Over the past couple of years, OneProjects, which now employs some 50 people in Ireland and Germany, has raised €26 million in funding from high-profile investors like EQT Life Sciences (formerly LSP), venture capital firm Atlantic Bridge and Imec.xpand, a Belgian early-stage and growth fund.
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Yet, when it comes to publicising their efforts, “we’ve been very stealthy”, says Lahart. “We’re not people who go out and talk a lot about what we do,” Hennersperger adds. “And we do this deliberately most of the time.”
The road to medtech success is paved with the carcasses of companies that either tried and failed or worse, courted publicity but ultimately overpromised and drastically underdelivered. In the US, the key market for OneProjects’ product, the failure rate in the sector is close to 75 per cent, according to research from TTI Health Research and Economics. Has this, perhaps, been a factor in their shyness?
“When we talk to partners and we talk to clinicians, investors and future investors,” Hennersperger says, “of course we have opportunistic and aggressive timelines of time, sure.” But he says: “Overpromising is something I’m, I wouldn’t say concerned about, but conscious not to do.” With a family background in medicine, he says his core focus has always been on the clinical applicability of OneProjects’ technology. “It’s a tribute to my history,” says Hennersperger, whose father is a general practitioner.
In 2023, the rubber is finally hitting the road with OneProjects, the company that they have built together since 2017 — or 2015 if you are being pedantic — entering a crucial phase in its life cycle. Lahart and Hennersperger are set to seek Federal Drug Administration (FDA) authorisation for their product in advance of human clinical trials.
With key milestones on the horizon, the partners’ attitude to publicity has changed somewhat since they were both named EY’s emerging Entrepreneur of the Year (EoY) last November. The win has probably been the “biggest thing” so far for OneProjects on the PR front, says Lahart.
“That’s going to change,” he adds, with the company eyeing a big overhaul of its brand this year as it looks for FDA approval and begins to roll out new products. “Even our website says kind of very little. It’s all very deliberate. We’ll be launching a new website. Not that we’re going to be out there ringing bells every day but we’ll certainly be more public-facing and more visible, getting involved in publications and trials and all of that kind of thing. So we’re moving into that scale-up phase.”
But what exactly is the product?
The device is a tiny imaging sensor mounted on a catheter. Once inserted into the patient, it generates 4½ gigabytes of data per second that provides a full, high-resolution image of the heart
Put simply, OneProjects is developing a cardiac imaging technology device for use in patients with arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation, a heart condition that affects more than 38 million people around the world. The device is a tiny imaging sensor mounted on a catheter. Once inserted into the patient, it generates 4½ gigabytes of data per second that provides a full, high-resolution image of the heart, a 360-degree roadmap for the doctor attempting to treat the irregularity.
The problem they are attempting to solve, Lahart said last September in Austin, Texas — where the pair dazzled judges and their fellow finalists with their pitch at the annual EoY executive retreat — is that every second patient who comes in for treatment has to come back “two, three or four times” for repeat procedures. “These treatments are performed endovascular,” Hennersperger explained, “so they have a small catheter going up to the heart and the treatment locally in the heart.” But the imaging technology being what it is at the moment, doctors are more or less fumbling around in the dark. “They can’t see directly what’s going on,” said Hennersperger at the time. “That’s the big problem.”
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Lahart and Hennersperger first arrived at this problem at BioInnovate, the University of Galway’s medical technology accelerator, where they were lumped together in 2015. First impressions were important for the pair, who both come from an engineering background: Lahart, from the mechanical, design and product development side and Hennersperger from the electrical engineering side.
“I could see he was a very smart guy,” says Lahart, “but it was way more than that. Finding a partner, the technical skills is not going to be what does it because you can hire someone for technical skills. We started the programme in August — it’s a 10-month programme — I would say probably by October, I kind of figured myself and Christoph have a certain chemistry that was working really well together.”
“For me being a non-local,” Hennersperger says, “going over to Galway, it was very, very challenging. I remember that vividly because Irish people tend to speak quite fast. Being put with Fionn, I thought he was a very smart guy who brings a lot of great ideas and does that within a very short period of time.” Within a few months, they were spending something like 40 hours a week with each other, developing ideas. “That’s a really great way, I would say, to see if you can work with the person,” he says.
Problems in healthcare are not difficult to find —'all you need to do is read the press and you’ll find them’
Lahart explains: “You go in [to the programme] with a blank page. There is a whole clinical immersion phase which is three to four months — we were in the cardiology space — where you can just essentially follow the clinicians, go to surgeries, go into clinics, just follow them around and you’re just looking for problems in healthcare.”
Problems in healthcare are not difficult to find —“all you need to do is read the press and you’ll find them”, quips Lahart —and soon-to-be business partners found hundreds in the end. The trick was to whittle them down to one problem or project that could be a global-scale business.
“We took a venture capital approach,” Lahart says. “Why would I invest in this company? Why would I go forward with this company? And we went from three hundred and something projects down to one.” Hennersperger interjects: “It was 352, by the way. I’ll never forget that number.”
But were they shocked when they discovered such a remarkable gap in the treatment technology?
Not really, says Lahart.
“I wasn’t surprised there wasn’t a solution,” he explains. “Biology is incredibly complex and this particular area where we are — electrophysiology — is relatively new. I would say the field has only developed since the 1980s. It’s constantly changing and it’s a very tech-driven space ... It wasn’t possible to do what we’re doing now 10 years ago, maybe not even five years ago, just from the amount of data we need to process in real time.”
Hennersperger is a bit more equivocal. “I was and am still surprised, given how much technology [is involved in cardiology] that the outcomes were and still are not better than what we have seen.”
Their answers perhaps underline some of the personality differences between the two co-founders. Yet, Lahart and Hennersperger, who run their dual nationality company very much in collaboration, insist their leadership styles rarely clash and, in fact, few if any cross words have ever passed between them.
“Everyone’s different,” Lahart says, “from a personality point of view from a cultural point of view: German style, Irish style, American style, whatever you want to call it. It’s just always going to be different.”
With the technology moving so quickly, OneProjects is a company that has to move quickly and its R&D team is already working on the next generation of the product even before the first iteration has been rolled out in clinical settings. To a large extent, the nature of the field it operates in means that this constant tinkering, trial and error is going to be a feature of life at OneProjects as long as the company is around.
“The medical field, medical understanding, medical science changes,” says Lahart. “There’s always new things that they’re doing in therapy and we need to be able to adapt to those as well. If we just have this one product that just sits there and that’s all it does, we’ll be obsolete in five years. So we need to make sure that what we’re doing here is the future of medical imaging. We do think this can be the future medical imaging for decades to come.”
Every year since 2015 has been entirely different and that makes it so exciting. That’s part of the journey of the entrepreneur and why I enjoy it as much as I do
— Christoph Hennersperger
If it sounds hectic, that’s because it is. How do the pair manage to switch off? With varying degrees of success by the sounds of it. Both men have gotten married and have had children since founding the company, something that they think has informed their attitudes and also their motivations and lifestyles. But Hennersperger admits that he finds it hard to switch off.
“I enjoy it too much to actually have to switch off,” he says. “Every year since 2015 has been entirely different and that makes it so exciting. That’s part of the journey of the entrepreneur and why I enjoy it as much as I do.”
“If you want longevity as an entrepreneur,” Lahart says, more cautiously, “I think you have to [learn to switch off]. Burnout is a very real thing, not just for entrepreneurs.” Exercise is key for both Lahart and Hennersperger, who says he looks forward to his trips to Ireland for hillwalking.
But if you don’t “block off time” for yourself and your family and friends, Lahart says, “you’re actually no use. You’re no use to your company ... you’re not going to make the right decisions. You’re not going to have the right insights so you have to manage. I watch out for that in Christoph. I watch for it in others.”
Despite the fast-moving nature of the sector, they say their basic concept has never changed and neither has their approach to running the business.
“I think importantly,” Hennersperger says, “probably the biggest value, besides getting along very well on a personal level and professionally is also that we always looked at this as a partnership: equal but with different roles and responsibilities, obviously. We started the company together and hopefully, we will either exit it or make it a success commercially together.”
As for a target valuation, the pair are remaining tight-lipped for the moment. “We have a goal,” says Lahart, “based on market data so we have a zone we want to be in. It’s interesting, [valuation] is something that’s talked about in tech all the time. Tech companies say it all the time. Medtech companies never say it.”
Why is that? “I think in the tech industry there is a bit more bravado. There’s a lot more hubris. In tech, you’re measured a lot on what’s my annual revenue, my monthly users, metrics that literally equate to cash. Medtech is different. I’ve seen incredible companies and technologies sold for relatively little and you think: ‘What the hell happened there?’”
CV
Names: Fionn Lahart and Christoph Hennersperger
Age: 41 and 35, respectively
Family: Fionn is married to Andrea and has two daughters, Farah and Isla, aged six and four. Christoph is married to Claudia. They have a two-year-old daughter, Leonie
Lives: Fionn in Dublin. Christoph in Mühldorf, about 50 minutes from Munich, Bavaria
Hobbies: Fionn loves the gym, playing football and tennis. Christoph likes spending time in the mountains and rock climbing
Something you might expect: Fionn says he is an entrepreneur at heart and plans to create several successful businesses. Christoph loves solving problems and enjoys that most days in his job are different
Something that might surprise: Fionn is an avid guitarist who occasionally gigs around Dublin. Christoph likes to chop trees, bake cakes and make chocolate
