This Entrepreneur Raised Over $250 Million To Build A Medical Device Company, Developing Surgical Robots To Make Minimally Invasive Surgery Available To Everyone

Entrepreneurship is often a winding road filled with unexpected twists, failures, and ultimately, moments of triumph. Few embody this journey as well as Michael Friedrich, who invested in and led Distalmotion from its infancy.

Michael’s path from a teenager dabbling in startups to leading a revolutionary surgical robotics company showcases resilience, strategic thinking, and an insatiable drive for innovation.

In this engrossing interview, he talks in detail about his experiences with building, scaling, and raising funding for this company.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Early Days: A Teenage Entrepreneur in Switzerland

Born and raised in Bern, Switzerland, Michael did not grow up in an entrepreneurial environment. His father was a dentist, and business-building was not a part of his household conversations.

However, his first exposure to the world of entrepreneurship came in the mid-1990s when the internet was still in its infancy. At 15, he started his first company, exploring programming and digital ventures.

While the venture was financially rewarding enough to support his schooling, for Michael, it was more than just a means to an end—it was an intellectually stimulating challenge. He enjoyed managing all the company’s dimensions.

“There was no downside,” he recalls. “We were living at home, getting meals from our parents, and had nothing to lose. It was just pure upside and exploration.”

Despite the early taste of entrepreneurship, Michael and his co-founders knew their teenage venture was not their lifelong career path. At 21, he made the conscious decision to pursue formal education, enrolling at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to study engineering.

School was Michael’s launch pad for learning something to get a real job in a true profession.

From Academia to Founding a Medical Device Startup

University proved to be a formative period for Michael. While studying, he led a student team designing a solar-powered race car, an ambitious project that would have allowed them to participate in a solar car race in Australia.

Ultimately, the EPFL Sunraycing Team project failed due to funding challenges. This setback was disappointing, but it also reinforced a crucial entrepreneurial lesson: the importance of securing financial backing for any ambitious venture.

Michael also got exposure to the full cycle of an entrepreneur and built more self-confidence for future ventures. He learned to trust his skills and intuition, which enabled him to start something right out of university.

Michael’s trajectory took a pivotal turn when a professor introduced him to intellectual property (IP) and invited him to explore a patented blood flow imaging technology.

Seeing an opportunity, Michael reached out to his former co-founder, Mark, and together, in 2008, they launched Aïmago SA, a medical device company.

Navigating Challenges: The Aïmago SA Experience

Aïmago SA’s journey was not without obstacles. Initially, the product—a blood flow imaging camera—was a marvel of engineering, but it lacked commercial viability. Sales were sluggish, and the company was at risk of failing.

Faced with mounting pressure, Michael and his team made a bold strategic move: they targeted the investors, key opinion leaders, and analysts of a larger, publicly traded competitor that relied on similar technology, which required the injection of a contrast agent into the bloodstream.

Michael explained that Aïmago had the next-generation technology, which was much cheaper and delivered the same results without needing an injection. His objective was to educate the market, while creating pressure on the share price of the competitor.

Their competitor was already listed on NASDAQ, and had an enormous market capitalization for very little revenue and huge losses. Since their multiple revenue to market cap was so high, it justified the market believing that they had a unique product.

Michael and his team’s aggressive strategy created market pressure, compelling their competitor to acquire Aïmago SA in 2014 for $12.5M. It was a successful exit, but Michael quickly realized that working within the acquiring company wasn’t for him.

A Leap into Robotic Surgery: The Birth of Distalmotion

While exiting Aïmago SA, Michael began looking for his next big opportunity. Through a mutual connection, he was introduced to Distalmotion, a promising startup in the surgical robotics field.

Within five minutes of meeting the founding team, Michael knew he wanted to invest his time, money, and expertise. “At that moment, I wanted to prove to myself that I could build something bigger than Aïmago SA—something truly transformative.”

Michael went all in, investing everything he earned from his previous exit. What made Distalmotion compelling was its focus on solving a significant problem in soft tissue robotic surgery: access.

Existing robotic surgical systems were expensive and complex, limiting their availability to only the highest-tier inpatient hospitals and surgical specialties with the highest reimbursement. Distalmotion’s solution, DEXTER, aimed to change that by providing a cost-effective and scalable alternative.

DEXTER had the potential to allow smaller hospitals and outpatient facilities as well as surgeons performing higher-volume, lower reimbursement procedures to integrate robotics into their operations.

Michael’s early investors were excited about what he did, though not necessarily from a financial return perspective. But from how they saw him and his team handling issues, solving problems, and showing perseverance.

As a result, when Michael joined Distalmotion as the lead investor of a series B round, these prior investors decided to chip in to become a part of its incredible story.

Michael was confident they had a well-defined market with the desired momentum based on understanding pain points. Distalmotion had the solutions to overcome the pain points and was ready to take the market on.

Michael recalls being excited about the learning and economic opportunities that Distalmotion presented. He was also enthusiastic about the personal development perspective–evolving by being exposed to the massive sequence of challenges and overcoming them.

Disrupting Robotic Surgery with DEXTER

As Michael explains, soft tissue surgery is divided into two main approaches:

• Open Surgery: A traditional approach requiring large incisions with a scalpel to provide direct access to the surgical site.
• Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS): A technique that uses small incisions, resulting in faster recovery, reduced pain, minimal scarring, and lower risks of blood loss and infection.

This is where the benefits of robotics become most apparent. MIS, while superior, is challenging to perform manually. Robotics simplifies complex, hard-to-learn steps—like suturing, dissection, and working in small, confined spaces—enhancing surgical precision and control.

The DEXTER Robotic Surgery System was designed to simplify minimally invasive surgery and more importantly, to provide an alternative for the burdensome installation, complex surgical workflows, and high costs of existing robots.

Today, as Michael sees it, access to robotics is still mostly limited to inpatient procedures. However, as health systems look to streamline operations and lower costs, many inpatient procedures are moving to hospital outpatient departments and ambulatory surgery centers, where traditional robots aren’t a good size, complexity, or cost fit.

After years of development and a pre-launch phase in Europe, Michael and his team have refined both the product and their understanding of the associated procedures, training, and clinical development processes.

Distalmotion received U.S. regulatory approval in 2023 for inguinal hernia surgery, a segment with over 1 million procedures annually. The company is now scaling its commercial operations in the U.S., aiming to increase robotic surgery access worldwide.

Team Building at Distalmotion

Michael reveals his unconventional strategies when building Distalmotion. When he joined, he met with an incredibly talented team of inventors headed by Ricardo Beira. Ricardo had earned his Ph.D. at EPFL and was a brilliant scientist with a unique perspective on technology.

However, in 2016, Michael and Ricardo realized that the technology needed to evolve into solutions no longer based on the initial idea. Ricardo opted for a secondary buyout of Distalmotion, and the team adapted to bringing in the right people for the right stage.

Michael stayed on as CEO until the autumn of 2023. That’s when they started to move from the product development, regulatory, and innovation-dominated phase into the commercially dominated phase.

Since the company needed veteran commercial leadership, they hired Greg Roche as the new CEO in November 2023 to handle the commercial and financial aspects. Michael took on the role of Chief Operating Officer, managing solution delivery–the entire innovation engine at Distalmotion.

Looking back at their decision to bring in a US-based CEO, Michael reveals that at that point, they realized that the single biggest market for medical devices is the US. The country also has most of the strategics with whom Distalmotion could potentially partner for financing.

Most importantly, the US has a really good stock market with NASDAQ. While Distalmotion was excellent at innovation in Switzerland and Europe, it needed financial, commercial, and strategic partnerships in the US.

The company needed a CEO with a strong track record in the field who could be a complementary person to the existing team. Greg is the perfect fit and brings tremendous value and strength, allowing the innovators to focus on their thing.

Raising Funding for Distalmotion

Michael talks in detail about his fundraising experiences for Distalmotion, which has more than 200 employees today. Although he had brought with him the previous investors from Aïmago SA, Distalmotion is a different-sized operation needing a unique type of capital.

The company secured over $250M, a substantial amount of funding. Michael reveals that they started with private money, business angels, private investors, and a small corporate venture fund, the lead investors in the Series A before he joined.

Distalmotion has $40M in private money, and $25M in strategic funding in the second wave. Renowned private equity company, Revival Healthcare Capital has made significant investments in the company along with a strong private equity venture fund out of Austin, Texas.

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Michael concedes that the fundraising journey wasn’t without hurdles, primarily because they initially lacked credibility. They were attempting to penetrate a market that already had a competitor with a market cap of close to $100B and several billion in revenues.

In comparison, Distalmotion was a smaller company attempting to compete with several big brands and innovators. However, Distalmotion had a much simpler and more pragmatic Swiss approach to robotics. Convincing investors of their effective solution wasn’t easy.

Between 2018 and 2021, the company faced monumental challenges and even ran out of money multiple times. There were situations where it couldn’t pay salaries for a month to 60 employees. However, their belief in the mission persevered and they stood beside the company.

Raising funding from Revival Healthcare Capital brought Distalmotion the credibility it needed. Now, the company has treated more than 1,600 patients and is earning revenues in the US and Europe.

Michael’s Vision for the Future of Distalmotion

Michael envisions a future where Distalmotion has been able to gain substantial market share in minimally-invasive robotic surgical procedures. He sees a time when millions of patients have been able to get these procedures and treatment thanks to the tools that they developed.

Distalmotion’s market reach would extend all across the US, Europe, and beyond, across numerous cities. He would want the treatment to be available to every person and get great outcomes. That’s when the 13-year hard work that went into building Distalmotion would have really paid off.

Launching and scaling Distalmotion has been a rewarding journey for Michael. Looking back, he credits his naivete and perseverance with helping him build the company. He comments wryly that if he had known the challenges he would have to overcome, getting off the ground would be harder.

Michael’s early companies became training grounds where he learned soft skills like negotiation, conflict management, and leadership on the job. He is grateful for being surrounded by people who have been very supportive from both personal and professional perspectives.

Michael looks forward to helping aspiring entrepreneurs on their journey. But he also cautions that not every project is a success. Admitting that an idea is not suitable for investing time is hard. The key is to surround yourself with a network of people who encourage you to move on.

Diverting one’s talent and limited time to other projects is advisable since there are lots of good ideas out there, though not each will translate into success.

Final Thoughts

From launching his first company at 15 to leading a cutting-edge surgical robotics firm, Michael Friedrich’s journey is a testament to resilience, strategic thinking, and the power of taking calculated risks.

Whether it’s building a startup, navigating acquisitions, or investing in the next big thing, his story is a masterclass in entrepreneurial growth. As Distalmotion continues its commercial expansion, Michael remains laser-focused on his mission: making robotic surgery accessible to more patients worldwide. And if history is any indication, he’s just getting started.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Michael’s teenage ventures gave him the foundation to take bigger risks later.
• Aïmago SA’s success came from creating competitive pressure, not just having great technology.
• Scaling a company requires evolving leadership beyond just technical expertise.
• In stable environments, entrepreneurship offers high rewards with relatively low downside.
• Distalmotion’s focus on accessibility in robotic surgery makes it a transformative player.
• Michael’s setbacks, like the solar car project, taught him valuable lessons about funding and execution.
• Michael’s journey from Aïmago SA to Distalmotion showcases the power of adaptability and long-term vision.

 

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