Medical startups Silicon Valley

Startup business plan takes shape

Becoming increasingly fixated on the idea, Mazin devised a practical design of a hardware system implementing this concept (RefleXion now has an issued patent for the innovation.). He also started developing a business plan, which was jumpstarted in the summer of 2008 by participating in Stanford Ignite, a four-week crash course in business for entrepreneurs without business backgrounds.

After completing the program, Mazin began looking for a cofounder. “I needed someone I could trust, who had succeeded at an early-stage startup, and whose skills would complement my training, ” Mazin says. And Nanduri, one of his closest friends from high school and from his undergraduate engineering days at University of Waterloo (Canada), met all of these criteria.

Indeed, after Nanduri completed his undergraduate degree in computer engineering in 2001, he had joined a venture-backed startup in Canada as its first employee. Nanduri eventually became the director of software development at SlipStream Data, leading a software team of 10 engineers, and played a crucial role in the company’s acquisition in 2006 by Research in Motion, the pioneering smartphone giant and maker of the BlackBerry.

Moreover, Nanduri was rounding out his startup experience with formal business training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Mazin successfully recruited Nanduri, and RefleXion was incorporated in California on 17 March 2009.

Kauffman Foundation fellowship jumpstarts funding

In contrast to the workings of most biotechnologies and medical devices, the performance of image-guided radiotherapy technologies can be predicted by physics software simulations and imaging experiments. The next crucial milestone in RefleXion’s execution plan was proving that its core technology worked through these software simulations.

Startup capital was needed to begin this important work. In a stroke of good fortune, Mazin was accepted to the 2009 Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (USA) Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship program, designed to help scientists commercialize innovative technology. The program gave Mazin the freedom (and a year’s funding) to focus 100% of his postdoc time on the company.

With the Kauffman fellowship serving as RefleXion’s first funding and Nanduri completing his MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Nanduri moved to Palo Alto in 2009 and the two cofounders began weeks of all-night coding sessions.