Eric Fain

There is a device sitting in a clean room in Houston, Texas that is roughly the size of a AA battery. It is threaded up through a leg, parked inside the aorta, and switched on. Once running, it nudges blood downstream, eases the load on a struggling heart, and lets the kidneys get the perfusion they have been starving for. The device is called Aortix. The company is called Procyrion. The person who has spent the better part of a decade pushing it toward patients is Eric S. Fain.

Fain is President and CEO of Procyrion, and his current work is narrow on purpose. The company has 28 employees and one idea it refuses to dilute: a percutaneous mechanical circulatory support device aimed at the brutal feedback loop where a failing heart and failing kidneys make each other worse, a condition clinicians call cardiorenal syndrome. In February 2024, Fain closed a $57.7 million Series E, including the conversion of $10 million of interim financing, to carry Aortix through its pivotal DRAIN-HF trial and prepare for commercial manufacturing.

What makes the bet interesting is who is making it. Fain is not a first-time founder swinging for a moonshot he barely understands. He has run a division at one of the largest medical device companies on earth. He has signed off on global R&D, regulatory, and clinical strategy. He could have stayed in that seat. He took the smaller, harder one instead.

Fain earned his M.D. from Stanford University School of Medicine, graduating in 1987. Before that, he studied applied math and biology at Brown, the kind of pairing that tells you something about how a person sees the world. While at Stanford he worked on early implantable defibrillator research with his advisor, Dr. Roger Winkle, an electrophysiology specialist who was deep in the problem of stopping hearts from killing their owners.

The plan after medical school was conventional enough: take a single year, do some fundamental research at a defibrillator startup called Ventritex, then return to clinical medicine. The year did not go as planned. Fain became enamored with devices. He stayed at Ventritex for a decade and never went back to seeing patients. A physician who builds the instruments rather than wielding them is a particular kind of person, and Fain has been that person for his entire adult life.

When St. Jude Medical acquired Ventritex in 1997, Fain went with it as Vice President of Systems Development. Then the climb began.

The St. Jude years read like a staircase. In 2007 Fain became President of the Cardiac Rhythm Management Division. In 2012 he took over the Implantable Electronic Systems Division. In 2014 he was named Group President of all of St. Jude Medical, with global sales, marketing, R&D, clinical, and regulatory functions reporting up through him across the entire worldwide portfolio.

Then Abbott bought St. Jude in 2017, and Fain became Senior Vice President and Group President of Cardiovascular and Neuromodulation, one of the senior-most operators inside a medtech behemoth. By any conventional measure of a career in medical devices, he had arrived.

In July 2018, he left it to become CEO of a small Houston company most people had never heard of. The Procyrion board wanted someone who could take a promising piece of technology and drag it through the unglamorous gauntlet of human trials, regulatory review, and commercialization. Fain had done every one of those things at scale. Now he would do them with a fraction of the resources and none of the safety net.

Run a 28-person company chasing a single device through a pivotal trial and you learn the religion of the cash runway fast. Fain talks about capital the way a sailor talks about water: finite, precious, and not to be wasted on anything that does not move the boat.

His pitch advice is similarly stripped of theater. When he tells founders how to talk to investors, there is no growth-hacking gospel, just a clear-eyed instruction to lead with what is real.

Two decades inside acquirers taught Fain something most founders learn the hard way: the company you build is, eventually, a company someone else evaluates. He says you have to wear the acquirer's hat early, building the quality systems and the discipline that make a deal less risky long before any deal is on the table.

He is just as blunt about the second customer every device company forgets until it is too late. Getting an FDA clearance is no longer the finish line, because a device nobody will pay for is a device nobody uses.

His instinct with regulators is partnership rather than poker. He pushes for upfront conversations about study design before a company sinks years into a trial the agency was never going to accept. It is the kind of patience that only makes sense if you have watched the alternative play out at scale, which he has.

Procyrion has raised on the order of $123 million across its life, including a $30 million round in 2019 to fund early clinical work and the $57.7 million Series E in 2024 to push Aortix through its pivotal trial. Each raise buys the same thing: more runway to answer the only question that matters, which is whether the device works in the people who need it.