David Carey

David Carey runs a company most people have never heard of, built around a problem almost every parent recognizes. Preceptis Medical, headquartered in Golden Valley, Minnesota, makes the Hummingbird Tympanostomy Tube System - a device that lets clinicians place pediatric ear tubes in the office, while the child is awake, without general anesthesia. Carey took over as chief executive in July 2025, and his job now is straightforward to describe and hard to do: get the device into more hands, in more places, for more families.

The scale of the opportunity is easy to underestimate because the procedure is so common. Roughly a million children in the United States have ear tubes placed every year. By age three, about one in fifteen kids will have gone through it. For decades, that has meant a trip to an operating room and a dose of general anesthesia for what is, mechanically, a very small intervention. The Hummingbird is Preceptis Medical's argument that it does not have to work that way.

Carey did not arrive at a startup by accident, and he did not arrive without a resume. He has spent close to three decades in medical devices, most of it in commercial leadership - the unglamorous, decisive work of getting a good product to the clinicians who will actually use it. He held sales and marketing roles at Medtronic in the mid-2000s. He ran Stryker's New England business as general manager. Along the way he served as vice president of sales and marketing at Invuity, where he helped guide the surgical-lighting company through a public offering before it was acquired by, fittingly, Stryker.

Most recently, before Preceptis, he was chief commercial officer at Pristine Surgical, a New Hampshire company working on single-use endoscopy. The through-line across all of it is commercialization: taking a technology that works in a lab or a limited release and building the sales structure, the reimbursement case, and the surgeon relationships that turn it into something used every day.

Why a small company, and why now

There is a version of a career like Carey's that ends comfortably inside a large corporation. He chose a twelve-person company instead. The bet is that the Hummingbird sits at exactly the kind of inflection point where commercial experience matters most - a device with FDA clearance since 2020, a commercial launch in 2021, and early-market results that suggested demand outrunning the company's footprint.

His first priorities have been less about invention and more about infrastructure. In October 2025, Preceptis announced it had selected AcuityMD, a data platform used across the medtech industry, as the technology backbone of what the company calls its Hummingbird Catalyst program. The idea is to use data to find the right surgeons to engage, set up sensible sales territories, and hire in the right places - the operational plumbing that lets a small team grow without breaking.

The phrasing is worth noting. Carey tends to describe growth in terms of "patient access" rather than pure volume. It is a small rhetorical move, but it reflects the actual challenge of introducing a device like this: the company has to convince three different audiences at once. Surgeons need to trust that the in-office procedure works and fits their practice. Payers need to see the economics. And parents and pediatricians need to know the option exists at all.

The three-audience problem

Carey has been direct about that triangle. Describing the Catalyst program, he framed AcuityMD as the tool that would help the company "engage with the right surgeons, and create greater awareness amongst payers, pediatricians, and parents about our unique solution." It is a compact summary of why commercial expertise, not just clinical evidence, decides whether a device like this succeeds.

He is also candid that the early results created pressure to move faster. "Our early market release demonstrated strong adoption and the need to further expand our footprint in the market," he said. In other words, the limited launch worked well enough that standing still was not an option. That is a good problem to have, and also the kind of problem that gets companies into trouble if they scale sloppily. Carey's background is essentially a hedge against that outcome.

A career built in upstate New York

Carey's roots are in upstate New York, where he earned a bachelor's degree from SUNY Geneseo and an MBA from the University of Rochester. It is a quietly regional origin for someone who has since worked at some of the biggest names in the industry - the kind of background that tends to produce operators rather than showmen.

What he inherits at Preceptis is a company with a clear thesis and a modest size, which is to say a lot of room to run. The Hummingbird is named for a bird known for precision and a light touch, and the company's whole pitch is a lighter touch on a procedure that has long felt heavier than it needed to be. Whether Carey can turn early adoption into a national standard is the open question of his tenure. His entire career has been a rehearsal for exactly that kind of question.

For now, he keeps returning to the same simple ambition: get the device to the surgeons who want it, and the families who need it, one office at a time.