BrightHeart obtains third FDA clearance and PCCP approval, becoming first to offer one integrated solution for real-time fetal heart documentation and CHD detection

BrightHeart obtains second FDA clearance for expansion of platform capabilities - adding tablet support for fetal heart ultrasound evaluations

SafeHeal® closes oversubscribed €35 million Series C equity financing 

CorWave announces the appointment of Dawn Sadlowski-Buisserez as Vice
President of Operations to support the ramp-up of production

Moon Surgical receives FDA clearance for ScoPilot™ on Maestro, industry's first AI-enhanced intraoperative capability, powered by NVIDIA Holoscan

BrightHeart unveils breakthrough AI results at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM) 2025 Pregnancy Meeting, revolutionizing prenatal care

MD Start

Advanced Perfusion Diagnostics

BrightHeart

Capital

CorWave

Endoron Medical

Gradient Denervation Technologies

HEPTA Medical

Julier Medical 

Crossover

LimFlow

May Health 

Moon Surgical

preCARDIA

SafeHeal

Medtech acceleration

The MD Start Strategy is Sofinnova’s in-house medtech accelerator. The team’s hands-on entrepreneurial expertise contributes to the platform's global leadership in company building.

Anne Osdoit

Mano  Iyer

Cécile Dupont

Anne is a Partner in the Sofinnova MD Start Strategy. She has run our in-house MedTech accelerator, MD Start, since she came on board as a Partner in 2015.

Anne embodies the MD Start team’s hands-on approach: She is the founding and current CEO of Moon Surgical. She is a Board member at both SafeHeal and May Health — two companies where she was also founding CEO.

“What I like about this job is that it is about building products and companies,” Osdoit says. “It is very diverse. It is in different therapeutic areas, in different spaces with different technologies.”

Prior to joining Sofinnova, Anne held several key positions at Mauna Kea Technologies, a Paris-based international medical technology company developing a disruptive “optical biopsy” technology. She was closely involved in multiple financing rounds, including the company’s 2011initial public offering on the NYSE Euronext Exchange in Paris, a highly successfuloperation and the largest public listing for the sector that year.

Anne is an active angel investor and an independent board member of Cardiologs Technologies, a Paris-based digital health startup that was purchased by Philips in 2021.

She is a trained biomedical engineer with degrees from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She holds additional degrees in Biostatistics and epidemiology applied to clinical trials (Université Pierre et Marie Curie), as well as Corporate Finance (London School of Economics).

Cécile is a Partner in the Sofinnova MD Start Strategy. She joined us in 2019, and is currently CEO of BrightHeart, a Sofinnova MD Start III portfolio company. She also brings her strategic expertise to Endoron, another Sofinnova portfolio company, to accelerate development of the company’s highly disruptive technology.

Prior to that, she was CEO of HEPTA Medical, COO of Gradient Denervation Technologies, and Director of Clinical, Regulatory and Market Access at SafeHeal, the first company created by MD Start II, where she managed the execution of the first-in-human study and regulatory approvals in the EU and US.

Navigating the regulatory landscape is one of Cécile's many talents.

“We need to make sure we start with the right strategy from the get-go because the regulatory strategy is one of the key drivers of the entire project,” she says. “It will drive the clinical strategy, but also the R&D strategy. This is really a key entry point for the project.”

Prior to joining MD Start, Cécile held various clinical, marketing and regulatory positions in both mature and start-up medical device organizations in the fields of endoscopy, pulmonology, dermatology, surgery and diabetes care.

Cécile holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from UTC (Université de Technologies de Compiègne) in France, Dalarna University (Sweden) and Favoloro University (Buenos Aires) in Argentina. She also has a degree in Corporate Finance from HEC in Paris.

Marion is an Associate withthe Sofinnova MD Start Strategy; she joined us in 2019. Marion is also the CEO of Ablacare, an MD Start portfolio company. She became CEO after successfully managing the execution of the first-in-human study and regulatory approvals for the company in both the EU and the US.

She enjoys MD Start’s fast-paced, close-to-the-ground approach. “My day-to-day is operational and hands-on, focused on building products and creating value for patients and clinicians with breakthrough innovations,” she says.

Marion also plays a big part in managing the MD Start deal flow, the identification and evaluation of the most promising ideas for incubation. She says that to get a full picture of an idea's potential, the MD Start team taps into collective intelligence, talking to people in different parts of the world who are entrepreneurs, purchasing managers, key opinion leaders and knowledgeable clinicians.

Prior to joining MD Start, Marion was the Head of Operations of Cardiologs Technologies, a French medtech start-up that uses artificial intelligence and cloud technology to provide advanced screening for atrial fibrillation and other heart rhythm disorders. Philips agreed to buy Cardiologsin November 2021.

Marion holds a Bachelor in Biomedical Science from Imperial College London, and a Master’s in Management (major in Entrepreneurship) from HEC Paris.

Mano is a Partner in the Sofinnova MD Start Strategy. A serial entrepreneur whose ties with Sofinnova Partners stretch back more than 15 years, he re-joined the firm in 2022.

“Sofinnova has realized something truly impressive in developing a first-class medtech ecosystem based out of Europe,” he said. “The firm is recognized globally as an influential player in the space, and I’m excited and proud to be back.”

In 2008, Mano was among the co-founders of the original MD Start team that incubated companies including CorWave and LimFlow. He also advised CoreValve, a Sofinnova Capital Strategy portfolio company, which was subsequently purchased by Medtronic for $800 million.

Mano founded ReCor Medical during his time as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Sofinnova Partners in 2009. He left Sofinnova in 2013 to work full-time as the Chief Operating Officer of ReCor, which was successfully sold to Otsuka Medical Devices in 2018.

Mano started his career in medical devices as an engineer at Arrow International. While at Arrow, he met Tim Lenihan. In 2001, he co-founded Contract Medical International (CMI) with Lenihan, and ran operations and engineering. CMI was acquired by Heraeus Group in 2020.

He joined Sofinnova Partners thanks to an introduction from Gerard Hascoët, whom he had also met while at Arrow. The trio (Hascoët, Lenihan, Iyer) joined forces with Antoine Papiernik and, with the backing of Sofinnova Partners, founded MD Start, which, now in its third iteration, has been fully integrated into the Sofinnova platform of strategies.

Mano holds an MBA from Stanford and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Gérard is a serial entrepreneur in the Medical Devices field.

In the 1980s, he founded Technomed International, a company developing noninvasive therapeutic technologies dedicated to urology. He grew the company to its IPO with 50 million euros in sales and significant profitability.

In the 90s, he founded 2 companies: IMMI, which developed image-guided robotic systems for neurosurgery, and SOMETEC, a maker of noninvasive hemodynamic monitoring systems for anesthesiology and intensive care. Both companies were acquired by U.S.-based companies, ISS and ARROW International respectively.

From 2008 to 2010 he turned around Spine Vision, a developer and manufacturer of spinal implants, as its CEO.

In 2009 Gerard cofounded MD Start, a European incubator for innovative MedTech companies, which created 8 companies. The idea was, he said, “to bridge this gap from the idea of the inventor to possible financing by VCs.”

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Gérard began his career with Thomson Group, where he held various management positions in the MedTech branch for over 15 years.

Gérard is an engineer from E.C.E. Paris. He is Executive Chairman of MD Start II, Chairman of CorWave, Chairman of Moon Surgical, Chairman of HEPTA Medical and sits on the Board of Directors of LimFlow, Pixium Vision and Altamir.

Close	Fund	AMT
2008	MD Start I	€8.2 million
2015	MD Start II	€10.3 million
2019	Sofinnova MD Start III	€63 million

TheTeam

BrightHeart obtains third FDA clearance and PCCP approval, becoming first to offer one integrated solution for real-time fetal heart documentation and CHD detection

BrightHeart obtains second FDA clearance for expansion of platform capabilities - adding tablet support for fetal heart ultrasound evaluations

SafeHeal® closes oversubscribed €35 million Series C equity financing

CorWave announces the appointment of Dawn Sadlowski-Buisserez as Vice President of Operations to support the ramp-up of production

Moon Surgical receives FDA clearance for ScoPilot™ on Maestro, industry's first AI-enhanced intraoperative capability, powered by NVIDIA Holoscan

BrightHeart unveils breakthrough AI results at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine (SMFM) 2025 Pregnancy Meeting, revolutionizing prenatal care

The
Team