Mark
Foster,
the curve
guy

The pitch takes about six seconds. Human bones are curved. The pelvis especially, a bowl of intersecting arches with narrow corridors a surgeon has to thread hardware through. For decades the hardware itself has been straight, because a straight screw is easy to make and easy to think about. CurvaFix builds an implant that bends to follow the bone instead. Mark Foster's job is to get that idea into every trauma center in the country, and he has been doing it since July 2023.

Foster is the president and CEO of CurvaFix, a roughly 38-person medical device company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. He did not invent the curved implant. He was hired to scale it, which in medical devices is a different and arguably harder skill. The best invention does not automatically win the operating room. The best-distributed, best-cleared, best-reimbursed one does, and that is the part Foster has spent nearly a quarter century learning how to do.

He arrived at CurvaFix at a convenient moment, which is to say the same week the company announced it had closed a $39 million Series C led by MVM Partners, with Sectoral Asset Management and existing investors along for the round. Most incoming CEOs get a honeymoon. Foster got a fresh balance sheet and a mandate. The money was earmarked for one thing: taking the CurvaFix IM Implant, already FDA-cleared and in use, and expanding it nationwide.

He was following a founder. Steve Dimmer had carried CurvaFix from concept through commercialization, and he moved into a strategic advisory role as Foster took over. This is a specific and underappreciated moment in a startup's life: the handoff from the person who can build the thing to the person who can sell it at scale. Getting that swap right, and its timing, is one of the rarer skills in the business. CurvaFix decided it was ready, and Foster was the operator it brought in.

Foster's career reads like a walking tour of medical device companies, and the through-line is consistent: find the procedure nobody has improved, then improve it. He spent about seven years at Boston Scientific, including a run as director of sales operations and training in the neurovascular division. Then roughly eight years at Smith & Nephew, working up to vice president of the U.S. Sports Medicine business.

In 2016 he joined Trice Medical, a company built around minimally invasive orthopedic procedures, as chief commercialization officer. He added the title of president in 2018 and was promoted to CEO in 2019. That progression, commercial chief to president to CEO, is essentially the arc of an operator being handed more and more of the whole machine. Earlier still, he held senior management roles at Covidien and at GlaxoSmithKline in Poland, giving him an international stretch most of his peers lack.

The degree, notably, is a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Richmond. Not an engineering degree, not an MBA anyone leads with. He runs an engineering-heavy company on the strength of knowing how to move products through hospitals, not how to design them, which is a fair description of what a medtech CEO actually does all day.

The core object is a curved intramedullary implant. Intramedullary means it goes inside the marrow canal of the bone, along the length of it, which is how you fix a fracture from within rather than plating it from outside. The trouble in the pelvis is that the corridors are not straight, so a rigid straight rod either doesn't fit or doesn't follow the strongest bone. CurvaFix's implant flexes to match the patient's own anatomy, then locks in to share the load.

The target population is bigger than it sounds. Fragility fractures of the pelvis, the kind an older person gets from a low-energy fall, are common, painful, and, in the industry's own framing, undertreated. There are roughly 200,000 pelvic fractures a year in the U.S. that warrant surgical intervention. It is a large, quiet market that nobody markets, which is precisely the gap CurvaFix was built to fill.

In September 2025 the company earned FDA 510(k) clearance for the CurvaFix Low Profile System, a refinement built on that surgeon feedback: a head geometry 65% smaller and implants up to 210 millimeters long, designed for the ugly cases involving pathological bone and narrow corridors. This is the second-clearance work nobody throws a party for, the iterative regulatory grind that quietly turns a single product into a platform. It is also the work that decides whether a device company keeps growing.

That Premier designation is the unglamorous machinery of medtech at work. A group purchasing organization is the plumbing through which a large share of American hospital procurement flows. A small company in Bellevue does not get into thousands of hospitals by charm; it gets in by clearing the contracting gates. Foster, unsurprisingly, framed the win in terms of reach.

Read those three public quotes together and a personality emerges, or at least a professional one. Scale. Patients, physicians, payers. Surgeon feedback. National reach. Foster talks like a man who has internalized that in medical devices the invention is table stakes and the distribution is the game. It is a less romantic story than the one about the clever curved screw, and it is the one that determines whether the clever screw ever reaches a patient.