Medical-device startup Eximis Surgical secures seed round of funding

LOUISVILLE — Local medical-device startup Eximis Surgical LLC closed recently on a $995,000 seed round of funding that will help the company continue development of a new device to be used for specimen removal in laparoscopic surgeries.

Officials for the Louisville-based company said Tuesday that their intent is to complete development work over the next 18 months, at which point they would look at submitting the device for approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Initially, the company is aiming to gain approval for its XCor device for use in hysterectomies. But the founders say XCor could eventually be used in a wide variety of procedures, including the removal of tumors.

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Founded two years ago this month, Eximis was started by a trio of longtime Covidien employees — Kristin Johnson, William Gregg and Donna Ford-Serbu — and Dirk Johnson, Kristin’s husband.

XCor provides an alternative to power morcellators, which some manufacturers such as Johnson & Johnson began taking off the market in recent years because of FDA concerns that they were inadvertently spreading undetected cancerous tissue in some patients during procedures. The power morcellators are successful enough at grounding up tissue for removal during laparoscopic surgeries. But the action of the spinning end of the devices makes for anything but a contained environment with regard to specimen removal.

Eximis’ XCor device, by contrast, encapsulates the specimen to be removed, such as a uterus or tumor, in a small bag, inside of which dissection of the tissue can be done before specimen pieces are pulled out and the bag removed. The idea is to keep the procedure contained, fast and easy to do, providing, as Ford-Serbu put it, “that last step in making minimally invasive surgery truly minimally invasive.”

“Kristin really saw this huge need and came up with this creative platform for the last mile of minimally invasive surgery,” Ford-Serbu said, largely crediting Johnson, Eximis’ CEO, for coming up with the idea for the new device.

The new funding, raised from undisclosed investors, follows a smaller $270,000 round raised early last year. Ford-Serbu said the new cash will get Eximis to the next stage of design development and the next big pre-submission milestone in the FDA-approval process. The company will likely need to raise one more round to get all the way to the FDA submittal.

“We’re really pleased about where we are so far with the minimal cash we’ve had,” Ford-Serbu said.

Eximis, which has a 2,000-square-foot office in Louisville, is also in the process of joining the Fort Collins-based Innosphere incubator, which helps facilitate young companies’ growth as they work toward commercialization.

“I think Innosphere has a lot of resources at their disposal and certainly has helped a number of companies be successful in achieving their goals,” Ford-Serbu said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the size of the Eximis funding round as $915,000.