Surgeons are often overworked, and patients also suffer as a result. In the podcast, the founder of Hellstern Medical explains how she wants to have found a solution for this.
Mortgage on the house, selling the family car: Sabrina Hellstern took a lot of personal risks to found her startup. That’s because of her motivation: she wants to save people’s lives. Because with Hellstern Medical she is working to make operations safer by supporting the surgeons and thus indirectly helping patients.
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Many surgeons suffer from pain due to stressful positions during hours-long operations, are permanently physically overworked and suffer from sleep disorders. This has a clear impact on how patients are treated. And if the surgeons are unavailable, the clinics will have to search for months for a replacement. Hellstern’s solution is called Noac: it is a device that helps surgeons. An exoskeleton. The product was launched at the end of last year and has been in series production for a few weeks.
Operations like 150 years ago
“At Daimler and Audi, tailgates are now assembled with support systems, with exoskeletons. In cardiac surgery, in neurosurgery, in all operating systems, the surgeons simply stand at the table like they did 150 years ago,” said the founder in the start-up scene podcast “This is how startups work.”
Hellstern worked in medical technology sales for years. So you know the market. But there are other reasons for starting a business in this area. “The dream is that at some point we can stand there and say: Man, with our product this patient could now be operated on better and more precisely,” says Hellstern. “And then we said there was no alternative to taking this risk. Because it’s much worse if we look back and didn’t have the courage to implement the solution that we learned was needed.”
Hellstern Medical in the podcast “This is how startups work”
“We” means CEO Sabrina Hellstern and CFO Claudia Sodha. In addition, she initially set up the project together with a team of engineers who developed the device themselves. A number of medical experts are also involved. Most recently, Hellstern Medical from Wannweil near Reutlingen raised money in 2021 and collected 3.2 million euros.
In the podcast with “How to Start a Startup” host Georg Räth, Sabrina Hellstern talks about how much courage it takes to put everything on one card to start a business, how she managed the process of having a medical product certified, then selling it and why she pooled her long list of shareholders.
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