Many MedTech founders assume the hardest part of fundraising is proving the technology works.
That instinct makes sense. Medical device innovation often begins with a compelling clinical problem, a novel technical solution, and a founder who can explain exactly how the product will solve the clinical problem and why it is different from any other available technology.
But investors are not only evaluating whether the device is promising. They are evaluating whether the team can turn that promise into a successful, revenue generating company that will be acquired by one of the large global medical device manufacturers.
A strong technology can open the door to investors, but the team determines whether the company has the ability to navigate regulatory complexity, product development, clinical evidence, quality requirements, commercialization, funding pressure, and the inevitable roadblocks and setbacks that happen along the way.
This article draws on expert insights from Axel Strombergsson, VP of QuickVault by Veeva, and Nirav Sheth, founder of Stratosphere, LLC, to explore what investors really look for in an investable MedTech team, and how founders can de-risk the investment by strengthening their knowledge, skills, and experience required to reach commercial success.
Investors are de-risking execution, not just technology
When a MedTech investor evaluates a startup, they are looking at risk from multiple angles.
Is the technology differentiated? Is the market large enough? Is the intellectual property defensible? Is the regulatory pathway realistic? Can the company reach meaningful milestones with the capital being raised?
Underneath all of those questions is a larger one: can this team execute?
That is why team risk matters so much. The team touches every category of risk. A strong team is coachable, can adapt when testing reveals an issue, when regulatory strategy changes, when commercial assumptions need to be revised, or when limited capital has to stretch across too many priorities.
For investors, the question is not simply, “Is this a good idea?” It is, “If we give this team capital, can they use it to reach the milestones they say they will reach?”
That question is especially important in MedTech because the path to market is rarely linear. Teams have to make technical decisions while also preparing for regulatory review, quality system readiness, clinical evidence, commercialization, and future scale. The stronger teams understand those dependencies early and build them into the plan before funding arrives.
In other words, execution is not a vague business concept. It is the practical work of moving a device through development, documentation, regulatory review, quality system readiness, and commercialization. An investable team is one that understands that burden before the money arrives.
Credentials get you in the room. Trust gets you funded.
Credentials matter. A team with prior startup experience, regulatory wins, commercial success, or previous exits will naturally give investors more confidence. But credentials alone do not make a team investable.
A founder may be an exceptional clinician, researcher, engineer, or technical expert and still struggle to lead a company. Building a MedTech business requires a different set of capabilities: judgment, humility, communication, prioritization, resilience, and the ability to bring the right people into the right conversations at the right time. This is especially important for first-time founders.
Investors know that early-stage teams will not have every answer. They are not expecting perfection. They are looking for signs that the team can learn quickly, respond to feedback, communicate clearly, and make credible decisions under pressure. That means trust becomes one of the most important factors in fundraising.
Trust is built when founders can explain what they know, what they do not know yet, where the risks are, and how they plan to close the gaps. It is weakened when founders present only best-case projections, avoid hard questions, become defensive when challenged, or act as if the technology alone will carry the company.
“Credentials may get the conversation. Trust gets the investment.” — Axel Strombergsson, VP of QuickVault by Veeva
Coachability is a major part of that trust.
Coachability does not mean agreeing with every investor, advisor, or mentor. It means being open to suggestions and curious enough to understand the concern behind the feedback and having an open mind to consider whether a decision or a plan should change.
The strongest founders do not treat every challenge as a threat. They treat it as information. They ask thoughtful follow-up questions. They acknowledge where the team still needs to learn. They can explain how feedback, evidence, or market realities have shaped the plan.
That mindset tells investors the team can adapt when the journey gets harder.
Investors need the story behind the science
MedTech founders are often deeply connected to the technology. That passion is valuable, but it can also create a common fundraising mistake: spending too much time explaining the product and not enough time explaining the outcome.
Investors need to understand the science, but they also need to understand the story around it.
What clinical problem are you solving? Why does it matter to patients, providers, or the healthcare system? How will the product reach the market and be paid for? What makes the commercial opportunity compelling? What will the company become if the team executes well?
Those are not surface-level marketing questions. They are business-critical questions.
A pitch that goes too deep into technical details too early can lose the investor before they understand why the opportunity matters. Detailed data, testing results, and technical documentation absolutely have a place, but that place may be later in the conversation, in diligence, or in backup materials.
In an early investor conversation, the goal is not to close the round on the spot. It is to create enough confidence and interest to earn the next meeting, then continue building momentum from there. Fundraising rarely happens after one conversation; it is a longer journey of trust-building, diligence, and repeated opportunities to show investors that the team can execute.
That requires a layered approach. Start with the high-level story. Explain the unmet need, the patient or clinical impact, the market opportunity, and the path to value creation. Then be ready to go deeper when the investor asks.
Founders can also make the conversation more productive by asking, “Where would it be most helpful for us to go deeper?”
That small shift turns the pitch from a monologue into a conversation. It also gives the investor a chance to engage where they see the greatest risk or opportunity.
For teams preparing regulatory submissions, that layered storytelling should still be backed by strong documentation and controlled development work. Resources like QuickVault’s guide to MedTech regulatory submissions and connected design controls and risk management can help teams think through how the evidence behind the story needs to be organized and maintained.
You do not need every expert in-house, but every critical perspective must be covered
Most early-stage MedTech companies cannot initially afford to hire a strong team to support every critical aspect of the journey from idea to exit. That is normal.
But investors still want to see that the company has access to the expertise needed to execute, and what the Human Resources strategy and plan look like to achieve major milestones.
That plan may include a mix of full-time employees, fractional leaders, consultants, advisors, mentors, board members, key opinion leaders, and strategic partners. The right model depends on the company’s stage, the milestone ahead, and the risk profile of the business.
Early on, it may not make sense to hire a full-time regulatory leader, quality leader, VP of Sales, or market access expert. But that does not mean those perspectives can be ignored.
Founders need early input from the functions that will shape the product’s path to market, including regulatory strategy, quality management, clinical input, product development, manufacturing, reimbursement or market access, commercialization, sales, and investor communication.
The danger is waiting too long to involve those perspectives.
A team may believe it can focus only on product development now and worry about regulatory, clinical, commercial strategy, and payment models later. But in MedTech, downstream requirements can influence the product decisions being made today.
If a team waits until clinical testing to get meaningful insights, it may discover that the product does not fully support the intended workflow. If regulatory strategy is treated as a later-stage activity, the team may miss documentation, testing, or design control expectations that should have been built into the development process earlier.
Commercialization and more specifically, how a device will be paid for, is another common gap.
Early-stage founders may assume they can think about market adoption, sales, distribution, and revenue strategy closer to clearance or launch. But investors want to understand early on how the company will sell their device.
If the team cannot speak confidently about the market opportunity, beachhead market, adoption path, payment models (including reimbursement) or commercial strategy, the investor will see this as red flags and thus a risky investment.
An investor-ready team does not necessarily need every expert on payroll. But it does need a clear plan for how critical expertise is being brought into the company at the right time in order to achieve the milestones that the funding round is intended to support.
Investors do not expect a perfect team. They expect a plan.
Every early-stage MedTech team has gaps.
The issue is not whether gaps exist. The issue is whether founders understand those gaps and have a credible plan to address them.
Hiding gaps creates more risk than admitting them. Investors can usually tell when a founder is overconfident in an area where the team lacks expertise. They ask hard questions for a reason. They want to know whether the team has done the thinking, pressure-tested the assumptions, and built a plan that can hold up beyond the pitch.
That is why transparency can make a team more investable, not less.
A founder does not need to pretend to know everything. In many cases, the stronger answer is:
“We do not have that expertise in-house yet, but we know it is critical. Here is who we are working with now, here is when we plan to bring that capability in more formally, and here is how we have budgeted for it.”
That kind of answer builds confidence because it shows self-awareness and planning.
One of the most practical steps a founder can take before fundraising is to conduct an honest team gap analysis.
Start with the business plan. What milestones are you asking investors to fund? What has to happen between now and those milestones? What expertise is required to execute each workstream well?
Then compare that need against the team you have today.
From there, build a resource plan that aligns with the fundraising plan. If the company needs market access support six months into the runway, that should be reflected in the budget. If the company plans to hire a VP of Sales six months before anticipated clearance or commercialization, that should be part of the hiring roadmap. If a quality or regulatory consultant is needed to support near-term execution, the timing and cost should be understood before the investor asks.
A simple planning framework can help:
- Milestone: What must be accomplished?
- Expertise required: What knowledge or experience is needed?
- Current owner: Who owns it today?
- Gap: What expertise is missing?
- Resource plan: Does the gap require a hire, consultant, advisor, mentor, or partner?
- Timing: When is the resource needed?
- Budget: Is the cost included in the fundraising plan?
- Investor message: How will you explain the plan clearly?
This is often an underdeveloped part of early-stage planning. Founders may have a strong product roadmap, regulatory strategy, market analysis, and pitch deck, but no clear HR or resource plan tied to the capital they are raising.
That is a missed opportunity.
A clear Human Resource plan gives investors confidence that the team knows how to turn capital into progress. They want to know that once the check is written, the team can start executing. The company should not spend the first several months after funding figuring out which expertise it needs. The clock starts when the money arrives.
Before you perfect the pitch deck, strengthen the team behind it
In the days before investor conversations, many founders focus almost entirely on making the pitch deck perfect.
The deck matters. But the stronger priority is the team behind the deck.
“Don’t keep perfecting the pitch deck. Work on the team behind the pitch deck.”
— Nirav Sheth, Founder, Stratosphere, LLC
A polished presentation cannot compensate for unclear roles, weak alignment, unrealistic timelines, hidden gaps, or a team that cannot answer hard questions with confidence. The best investor preparation happens before the pitch narrative is finalized.
Founders should use that window to pressure-test the team itself:
- Clarify the strategy. What is the company raising money to accomplish? Which milestones will this round support? Which assumptions need to hold true?
- Align the leadership team. Does everyone agree on the company’s direction? Are roles and responsibilities clear? Are there unresolved disagreements that could surface later?
- Map the gaps. What expertise is missing? Which gaps are manageable today? Which ones become serious risks if they are not addressed before the next milestone?
- Build the resource plan. Who needs to be hired, contracted, advised, or consulted? When are those resources needed? Are the costs included in the fundraising plan?
- Pressure-test the story. Can the team explain the patient impact, commercial opportunity, regulatory path, and execution plan clearly without getting lost in technical detail?
- Prepare for hard questions. Where is the plan most vulnerable? What will investors challenge? What will the team say when it does not know the answer?
- Strengthen the operating foundation. As the company moves toward submission and commercialization, the team needs systems that support controlled execution, not spreadsheet chaos. A purpose-built eQMS can help small and growing teams centralize quality, design, regulatory, and operational work in a way that scales. Learn how to make the switch to an eQMS.
The goal is not to become perfect in the days leading up to your investor pitch. It is to become clearer, more aligned, more transparent, and more prepared. That is what investors are really looking for.
Build a team investors can believe in
MedTech investors know the journey from concept to commercialization is difficult. They know plans will change. They know milestones may slip. They know early-stage teams will have gaps.
What they need to believe is that the team can handle those realities.
That belief is built through leadership, transparency, coachability, communication, and credible execution planning. It is built when founders can tell a clear story, acknowledge what they do not know, surround themselves with the right expertise, and show how every dollar raised will move the company toward its next milestone.
Great technology and big commercial opportunities matter. But technology and opportunity do not navigate regulatory strategy, build quality systems, hire the right people, communicate with investors, distribute the product, or recover when a major roadblock emerges.
Teams do.
And in MedTech, the team behind the technology may be the clearest signal of whether the company is ready to become more than an idea.
Build a stronger MedTech operating foundation with QuickVault
Investors want confidence that your team can execute. QuickVault by Veeva helps small and growing MedTech companies build that confidence with a connected platform for design, regulatory, quality, and post-commercial operations.
With QuickVault by Veeva, MedTech teams can replace disconnected processes with a purpose-built solution designed to support development, submission readiness, quality management, and long-term growth.
Request a personalized demo to see how QuickVault can help your team move from promising technology to investor-ready execution.
Article Contributors
Nirav Sheth
Founder and President of Stratosphere, LLC
Nirav Sheth is the founder of Stratosphere, where he works as a Certified Life Coach, Leadership Coach, and Business Strategist. He brings 25 years of medical device industry experience, including 23 years at Medtronic in leadership roles across general management, marketing, program management, and engineering.
Axel Strombergsson
Vice President of QuickVault, Veeva Systems
Axel brings over 20 years of diverse experience in MedTech, spanning R&D leadership, operations, regulatory strategy, and medical device commercialization. Before joining Veeva, Axel led R&D efforts for a surgical device company and later transitioned to roles focused on scaling operations and bringing medical devices to market. As VP of QuickVault, Axel helps small and growing MedTech companies strengthen quality operations, connect design and risk processes, and build scalable systems for the full product lifecycle.
