CCIT Tenant VEESAG Mobile Gets Nod to Commercialize Life-Saving Wearable Technology
TRENTON (September 9, 2015) – The past few months have brought a flurry of activity to VEESAG Mobile, a developer of wearable technology aimed at helping people maintain their independence, remain healthier and live better.
The company, which is housed at the New Jersey Economic Development Authority’s (EDA) Commercialization Center for Innovative Technologies (CCIT), recently renamed and rebranded itself from Vesag Health to VEESAG Mobile, to better represent the company’s vision and focus.
VEESAG Mobile’s devices are designed to reduce hospital visits and to help people focus on health and wellness. The company’s smart watch, Mobile Personal Emergency Response System (MPERSENS®), comes equipped with a one-touch emergency button, as well as location tracking, fall detection, and remote monitoring. It can share critical information with family members and remind wearers to take their medication. In July, Sprint determined that MPERSENS was compatible for use on its network and last month Verizon confirmed the same for its network. With that critical infrastructure in place, VEESAG Mobile has started to scale up the manufacturing of its watches in order to make them widely available to consumers.
Another one of VEESAG Mobile’s products – mOperate, a “Connected Car” solution- received patent approval in June. Still under development, mOperate will be able to monitor both a car and its driver for potential problems and can transmit vital information to a remote monitoring server.
“As a visionary entrepreneur, VEESAG Founder and CEO Raj Sadhu has developed technology that is valuable to consumers in terms of both safety and quality of life,” EDA Chief Executive Officer Melissa Orsen said. “We are glad that VEESAG Mobile calls our commercialization center ‘home’ and we are excited to watch the company grow.”
Since arriving at CCIT in 2012, VEESAG has made the most of its time at the incubator. Sadhu, who won the Albert Einstein Award at the 2014 New Jersey Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards, frequently attends programs and presentations offered by the EDA, such as Founders & Funders. Held semi-annually at CCIT, Founders & Funders directly connects entrepreneurs and start-up companies with angel and venture capital investors, offering one-on-one sessions to discuss strategy, business models and funding opportunities. Registration is now open for the next Founders & Funders event, which will be held on will be held on October 27.
CCIT offers its two-dozen tenants a wide variety of educational programming and mentoring to help them grow – many of these programs are also available to companies not housed within the incubator. CCIT’s leasable space includes various office spaces, as well as both small and large labs. Annual lease agreements allow for additional space to be added as needed, to accommodate growing companies.
@NJEDATech spoke with Sadhu about VEESAG’s experience at CCIT and the company’s plans for the future:
What have you found most helpful during your time at CCIT?
CCIT provides us with numerous resources to be successful, from office space to frequent meetings with individuals from all over the world who are interested in our products. We have benefited from informative sessions through the Executives-in-Residence program on managing various functional aspects like product commercialization, fund raising, legal, accounting and patent licensing, etc. In addition, programs like the Angel Investor Tax Credit and funds-matching provide avenues to help make VEESAG more attractive to investors, and being located at CCIT lends credibility to tenants. Meeting other entrepreneurs who work late hours and work on weekends motivates everyone; we routinely speak to other entrepreneurs and learn lots of new things.
One-on-one meetings with management during every step of building our business have provided invaluable guidance. I sincerely thank the EDA’s Technology and Life Sciences Director Kathleen Coviello, CCIT Program Manager Anne Marie Maman, Senior Venture Officer Kamran Hashmi, Program Specialist Rosa Szeliga, Program Assistant Cyndi Costello and all of the other EDA staff for the help that I have received.
How did the one-on-one meetings held at Founders & Funders help your company?
Founders & Funders was a great opportunity to meet so many investors in one place. Unlike other summits, we were able to talk in detail about our venture. We received some invaluable feedback from investors that day, which provided us with insight into the funding process, value building and dilution aspects.
What is VEESAG’s biggest success to date?
We look at success from different perspectives. VEESAG came into being at a time when there was no awareness about smart watches and no proactive health monitoring. Today, VEESAG is a global brand with strategic relationships around the world. The VEESAG brand prides itself on the impeccable credibility it has achieved over the years.
The VEESAG smart watch has successfully met stringent regulatory requirements, when others have failed miserably and given up. Today the mobile health and personal emergency response systems market is crowded with lot of new entrants, but VEESAG stands out and offers unique patented offerings that are clearly distinctive and a cut above the rest. We are privileged to be featured in many articles that talk about innovation in mobile health.
Our success also is also evident from the positive feedback we have received from numerous customers. It gives us an immense sense of satisfaction to realize that our products help the citizens of the world live a healthy and independent life.
What’s on the horizon for VEESAG?
We received an overwhelming response for MPERSENS without even marketing/advertising the product! We have pre-orders from a handful of customers for nearly one million devices in the next year. Globally, we have 159 clients that have approached us about launching our device in the coming months. Building the product and supplying them in a timely fashion is one of our biggest challenges. Our third-generation device is in development and we think, with that new device, we can disrupt the home health care and emergency management market. We should be able to reduce hospital admissions and promote pre-emptive health care for the masses.
For more information about resources available at CCIT visit https://www.njeda.gov/ccit and follow @NJEDATech on Twitter and LinkedIn.
