Clay Nolan's company began with a distraction. In a cardiac-arrest response, a senior clinical responder can be pulled into one exacting job: establish an airway, confirm it, keep confirming it, then manage ventilation. Nolan knew that workflow from the inside. He was a practicing paramedic before he became the founder and CEO of CoLabs Medical, and his public account of the company starts with what the scene demanded from the responder. The equipment worked only when a person supplied expertise, attention and repeated checks. Nolan began asking whether more of that burden could live in the device.
The question became VENTOR, an investigational airway and ventilation system. In Nolan's explanation, an inserted airway has two possible destinations. CoLabs designed its tube to operate in either, detect its position and direct air accordingly. The companion machine coordinates ventilation with chest compressions. Instead of asking a responder to run two separate rhythms, the system is intended to make them part of one sequence.
That description sounds compact. The timeline is not. A provisional filing cited by later patents dates to December 2011. CoLabs was founded in 2012. Nolan was pitching investors in 2018, presenting at medical-technology conferences in 2022 and 2023, and accumulating patent grants along the way. The registered VENTOR study began in April 2025. A clear product thesis has carried the company for well over a decade, through the slower work of proving that an idea can become an engineered, regulated system.
“You are never given enough information before you make a decision to make the right one.”Clay Nolan, on startup decision-making
The expensive unit is attention
Nolan's useful insight is not confined to airway engineering. He treats attention as part of the equipment list. Every task in an emergency has a human price, and a scarce unit is the concentration of an experienced person. If a device needs that person to place it, verify it and continually watch it, its cost is larger than the purchase order.
This reframes simplification. Fewer buttons help. Smaller hardware helps. But a product becomes meaningfully simpler when it gives judgment back to the user. Nolan has said the goal is to free physicians, nurses and emergency responders for other work. In his pitch, VENTOR's “smart” quality is practical rather than theatrical: it is supposed to know its location, manage its configuration and synchronize with the procedure already under way.
The distinction reaches beyond medicine. The ordinary instinct is to accelerate the user: clearer instructions, faster training, a shorter checklist. Nolan's approach asks which parts of the checklist should remain human at all. The answer must survive engineering and clinical testing, but the question is valuable on its own. Look for the moment when the user stops doing the larger job to serve the tool. That is often where a product opportunity is hiding.
Design for the thirteenth floor
Onstage at LSI USA in 2023, Nolan offered a better product brief than any tidy innovation framework. Responders are not going to carry another piece of equipment up thirteen flights of stairs and then help move a 350-pound patient back down, he said. A new machine has to replace something they already carry. CoLabs incorporated suction into VENTOR partly through that logic.
The anecdote brings the device out of the conference hall. Hardware occupies space. It adds weight. It must be cleaned, charged, stocked and found when the room is crowded. A feature can succeed on a test bench and still fail the stairs. Nolan's operating frame is physical: what comes out of the bag if this goes in?
He applies the same groundedness to startup work. In an interview shared on LinkedIn, Nolan described startup life as being about “recovery.” He credited mentors and the flexibility to work through a process whose information arrives too late for perfect decisions. In a later comment, he made the long haul comic: “I'm in the process of eating an elephant. I'm definitely at the rump but I'm not sure if I started at the trunk or tail.”
The joke fits medical-device development. Progress is real, but its shape can be hard to see while standing inside it. A grant lands. A prototype changes. A patent issues years after its application. A clinical plan becomes a registry entry. The neat sequence appears mostly in retrospect.
A provisional filing later cited across the assisted-ventilation patent family.
CoLabs is founded around an integrated emergency airway and ventilation concept.
Nolan presents the system at LSI USA and an NSF Phase I project begins.
He returns to LSI with a clinical-study design and a field-driven product case.
The registered VENTOR study begins; another U.S. patent grant follows in July.
An analogy that doubles as a roadmap
Nolan often explains his ambition through the automated external defibrillator. Defibrillation moved from a specialist intervention toward a guided machine that appears in airports, stadiums and other public places. He wants airway and ventilation technology to travel a comparable route. In the near term, CoLabs describes professional settings: ambulances, fire apparatus, military response and hospital crash carts. Nolan's longer view places a device beside the AED.
The analogy does several jobs. It makes a complex market legible. It gives the engineering team an ambition larger than incremental improvement. It also imposes a severe design constraint. A public-access device cannot rely on the habits of a specialist. It has to guide, monitor and tolerate the conditions of occasional use.
Nolan has used a family anecdote to press the point, telling an audience that his five-year-old daughter could place the airway. It is a pitch, not clinical evidence, and CoLabs' own study record identifies VENTOR as unapproved or uncleared. Still, the line exposes the target: take a procedure known for complexity and redesign it until placement is no longer the center of the user's attention.
There is discipline in returning to the same analogy year after year. In Nolan's 2022 presentation, the AED framed the market from ambulances and crash carts to public locations. In 2023, the image returned as he described a professional beachhead and later settings where trained staff have less frequent contact with cardiac arrest. The details around the route changed as financing, validation work and clinical planning moved forward. The destination stayed recognizable. That continuity matters because a medical-device company must speak to engineers, regulators, clinicians, investors and eventual buyers without inventing a different company for each room. Nolan's AED comparison gives those groups a common picture while leaving the technical claims to patents and testing.
Watch Nolan explain the VENTOR systemLSI USA '22 presentation / YouTube / opens in a new tabThe proof phase
By 2025, the company had crossed from conference plans into a registered study. ClinicalTrials.gov records an actual start date of April 4, with Stony Brook University Hospital as the recruiting location in the latest posted update. Estimated enrollment is 25. The study is designed to evaluate initial safety and effectiveness in providing short-term ventilation support during resuscitation, with measures covering oxygenation, ventilation and device-related adverse events.
That milestone changes the nature of the story. Patents establish ownership of an invention. Demonstrations establish that a prototype can make sense to an audience. A clinical study asks a more consequential question under a formal protocol. Nolan spent years making VENTOR easy to explain. The registered study begins the work of making its performance measurable.
He has another company in the background of this journey. Nolan co-founded Watershed Medical in 2019 with Christopher Kinsella and remains a board member. Watershed's public team page identifies him through his CoLabs role, while company filings describe his contribution to planning and governance. The connection suggests a founder comfortable carrying technical ideas across organizational boundaries, even as CoLabs remains the work associated closely with his name. At CoLabs, a public team listing names physician and medical-device founder Michael Laufer as co-founder. Nolan's own comments also credit industry mentors with helping him keep enough flexibility to work through the startup process.
The enduring lesson is less about stamina than translation. Nolan translated field experience into a design requirement, a design into patent language, a machine into an investor story, and that story into a clinical protocol. Each translation loses something unless the original observation stays sharp. His has: skilled attention is scarce, the scene is heavy, and a useful machine should give the operator something back.
“The chain of survival has become so much more intelligent and connected. It's an exciting space and a good time to be here.”Clay Nolan
The sentence captures Nolan's optimism without hiding the length of the route. Intelligence and connection are not decorations on his product. They are the mechanism by which separate tasks are meant to become one system. The VENTOR thesis began in the friction of an emergency scene. Its next chapter will be written in measured results.