The nonprofit medtech incubator that a legendary surgeon-inventor built to make sure the next inventor doesn't have to go it alone.
The wordmark sits on a hospital campus, not a glass tower downtown. Look closely and that is the whole thesis: when your job is turning ideas into patient care, you keep the patient in the frame.
The Profile
There is a particular kind of company that only makes sense if you understand the problem it was built to solve, and Fogarty Innovation is one of them. It is a nonprofit medtech incubator on the El Camino Health campus in Mountain View, California, which is a slightly strange sentence, because "nonprofit" and "incubator" are words that usually pull in opposite directions. Incubators, as commonly understood, exist to take equity, exit, and repeat. Fogarty Innovation takes something closer to a teaching load.
The reason is in the name. Thomas J. Fogarty, MD, was a cardiovascular surgeon who, as a resident in 1961, invented the balloon embolectomy catheter - a device that turned a brutal operation into a routine one and is still in use worldwide. He went on to hold roughly 190 patents and to found or cofound more than 45 medtech companies. That is not a career; that is a category. In 2007 he founded the institute that carries his name, on the theory that the hard part of medical innovation is not the flash of the idea but the long, unglamorous slog of getting it into a patient.
This is worth dwelling on, because it is the whole business model. In software, you can fail fast: ship, break, iterate, and the worst case is a bad Tuesday. In medtech, the worst case has a heartbeat. A device that ships broken is not a rounding error; it is a person. So Fogarty Innovation is slow on purpose. It coaches. It runs education programs before it runs pitch practice. It puts founders next to a hospital so the clinical reality stays in view. If that sounds inefficient, consider that its portfolio companies have raised more than $1.2 billion combined - about $34.5 million each - over an average stay of 3.2 years.
The organization describes itself, plainly, as "a dedicated team of proven medtech innovators, passionate about using our know-how and experience to make medical advancement happen." That is a mission statement doing an unusual amount of honest work. The team's leadership carries something like 450 cumulative years of experience across 80-plus companies, and companies that team has mentored have returned roughly $8 billion to investors. The pitch, in other words, is not money. Money is downstream. The pitch is proximity to people who have already done the thing.
To accelerate the invention, development and deployment of new technologies into clinical care - starting with education.The Fogarty Innovation mission
How It Works
Practical programming for medtech stakeholders, drawing on a bench of 300+ industry experts. The model puts learning before pitching - founders build the fundamentals before they build the deck.
Immersive, hands-on support for early-stage companies: coaching, lab and office space on the hospital campus, and access to a network of investors and strategics.
Partnerships with hospitals, corporations, investors and universities that speed the invention, development and deployment of new medical technology into care.
What You Can Do With It
If you are an early-stage medtech founder, Fogarty Innovation is a place to be coached through the parts that kill most device companies: the regulatory pathway, the reimbursement math, the clinical evidence, the fundraising narrative. You get space on a hospital campus and a mentor bench that has already made the mistakes you are about to make.
If you are a student, the internship is unusually concrete. It pairs you with a resident startup, puts you in the room to observe real procedures, sends you on field trips to medtech companies, and layers in lectures on how the industry actually works. You do not learn how devices get built from a textbook; you learn by standing next to the people building them.
If you are a strategic or investor, the alliances program is a filtered pipeline - a way to see credible early-stage technology that has already been pressure-tested by people who know the difference between a demo and a device.
And if you are simply in the field, the education programs are open doors into a body of hard-won knowledge that usually only travels by apprenticeship.
The People
Cardiovascular surgeon and serial inventor with ~190 patents and 45+ companies to his name, from the balloon catheter to the AneuRx stent graft. He founded the institute in 2007 and passed away in 2025 at 91.
Named CEO in 2017. Previously led Ardian and Twelve to Medtronic acquisitions worth more than $1.7 billion combined - and now channels that into building the next generation of founders.
The Record
Resident Thomas Fogarty invents the balloon embolectomy catheter, transforming vascular surgery.
Dr. Fogarty founds the institute on the El Camino Health campus in Mountain View.
Veteran medtech executive Andrew Cleeland is named CEO to lead the next chapter.
The organization raises a reported $5M Series A round in November.
Dr. Tom Fogarty passes away at 91, leaving 190 patents and 45+ companies.
Fogarty Innovation merges with the Cardiovascular Research Foundation and awards its inaugural Thomas J. Fogarty Prize to the Farapulse pulsed-field ablation team.
Fogarty Innovation will continue to carry its name and mission - now serving as the West Coast innovation hub for New York-based CRF.On the October 2025 merger
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