A pharmacist-founded company building the chain of custody for the most overlooked moment in hospital pharmacy: where leftover controlled substances actually go.
Above: the MIDAS wordmark, photographed doing what the company itself does best - sitting quietly while insisting you pay attention to it.
A nurse has given a patient part of a dose of a controlled substance. The rest - a measurable, divertible amount of an opioid - has to be discarded. The rulebook says a second person should watch it happen. The reality, for decades, is that nobody was around, the clock was ticking, and the leftover went down the sink on the honor system.
MIDAS Healthcare Solutions exists for that exact thirty seconds. The company builds MIDAS VIEW, a secure workstation that records every disposal of leftover medication with 360-degree video, checks it with software, and chemically neutralizes the drug so it can't be fished back out. It is not glamorous technology. It is a camera, a scanner, a screen, and a very stubborn idea: that a documented record beats a trusting shrug.
Today MIDAS is a small New York company - roughly 19 people - selling into one of the most regulated buyers on earth: the American hospital. It is the unfashionable corner of health tech. There is no consumer app, no glowing wearable. There is a cart. But the cart watches.
When people picture the opioid epidemic, they picture pill mills and street corners. They rarely picture a supply closet. But healthcare workers divert controlled substances - skimming doses meant for patients - and the leftover-disposal step is where the paper trail historically went blank. No camera, no second witness, no record. Just an entry in a log that says, more or less, "trust me."
This is the tension MIDAS threads through everything it builds: the most divertible moment in the medication lifecycle was also the least observed. Hospitals were data-rich about dispensing and administration, and data-blind about what got thrown away.
The cost of that blind spot is not abstract. Diverted medication means patients under-treated, clinicians at risk, and institutions exposed. The honor system, it turns out, is a generous accounting method for a controlled substance.
MIDAS was founded in 2017 by Michael LaFauci, RPh - a registered pharmacist, which matters more than it sounds. The product was not dreamed up by someone reading about the problem. It was designed by someone who had lived the workflow, watched the witnessing fall apart, and understood why busy clinicians cut the corner. The bet was that you could make accountability automatic instead of asking exhausted people to be more disciplined.
That bet drew a leadership bench around it - a chief operating officer, a chief product officer, a chief commercial officer in Sebby Borriello, and a general counsel, because selling a controlled-substance device means living inside regulation. Then it drew capital. MIDAS raised a Series A, extended in October 2023 with a $2M investment from the MCPC Healthcare Fund, bringing total funding to roughly $4.19M.
The numbers of a company that is small on payroll and large on ambition - the classic ratio of a startup trying to fix an entire system's quiet habit.
MIDAS VIEW reportedly stands for Verified Institutional Environment for Wasting, which is the rare acronym that is both bureaucratic and accurate. It bundles a few capabilities into a single workstation, each aimed at a different way the old process leaked.
Captures a panoramic, time-stamped video of each disposal transaction - so a second human witness no longer has to be standing there for the record to be real.
Records the full event and checks it with software, turning a he-said-she-said log entry into reviewable evidence.
Supports forensic analysis of disposed medications and waste samples, useful when an investigation needs more than a video.
Renders leftover medication unrecoverable and maintains a secure, end-to-end record that integrates with hospital systems.
Notably, MIDAS frames itself as moving past the recording era. The pitch is not just "we filmed it." It is "we can tell you what the pattern of your waste means" - clarity, control, and intelligence rather than a shelf of tapes nobody reviews.
In one hospital deployment, MIDAS reported a 38% reduction in the time nurses spent in possession of controlled substances. That metric does double duty: less time holding the drug is better workflow, and it is also fewer opportunities to divert. The same deployment ran a secure, user-definable waste-sample collection system while maintaining end-to-end chain of custody.
The proof is also in the company MIDAS keeps. It engineered MIDAS VIEW with Nottingham Spirk, the Cleveland innovation firm, and built its diversion-prevention software with IQ Inc. Its patented medication-waste-and-data-collection technology gives the claims teeth.
MIDAS describes its mission as revolutionizing medication security and waste management - making every disposal seen, tracked, and validated. The vision goes one step further: not merely recording what happened, but using the data to help institutions act, prevent, and protect ahead of time.
It is a tidy ambition for an untidy reality. Hospitals do not enjoy buying things that imply their staff might steal. MIDAS's task is partly technical and partly diplomatic: sell accountability as a workflow gift rather than an accusation. The 38% number helps. So does the fact that the founder is a pharmacist who is, in effect, protecting his own profession's credibility.
Regulatory pressure on controlled-substance handling is not loosening. As scrutiny tightens and health systems are asked to prove - not assert - their waste practices, a documented record stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the cost of doing business. A 19-person company is, improbably, positioned at that exact pressure point.
Go back to that 2 a.m. floor. The syringe is still half full. The nurse is still tired. The clock is still ticking. But now there is a workstation that records the disposal, verifies it, neutralizes the drug, and files the proof - whether or not a second human happened to be free. The thirty seconds that used to disappear now leaves a mark.
That is the whole company, really. Not a moonshot. A camera, a cart, and the unfashionable conviction that the moment nobody was watching was exactly the moment worth watching.