Episode 57 · November 18, 2025 · 43m listen · 7,057 words · ~35 min read

How Market Intelligence Shapes MedTech Growth with Kevin Saem | Ep. 46 - Full Transcript | The Med Device Cyber Podcast

Read the complete, searchable transcript of Episode 57 of The Med Device Cyber Podcast - expert conversations on medical device cybersecurity, FDA premarket and postmarket guidance, SBOM management, threat modeling, and penetration testing.

Prefer the listening experience? Open the episode page for the synopsis, key takeaways, topics, and Apple / YouTube listen links.

Episode summary

In this episode of The Med Device Cyber Podcast, host Christian Espinosa is joined by Kevin Saem, the founder of Zaparus, a SaaS platform providing market intelligence specifically for the MedTech industry. The conversation centers on the intersection of market intelligence, sales strategy, and cybersecurity within medical technology. Kevin shares his journey from a research background with a PhD in translational chemistry—where he worked on portable diagnostics and tissue engineering—to the world of entrepreneurship. His experience as COO for a liquid biopsy startup in France exposed him to the challenges of raising capital and scaling a business, ultimately leading him to identify a significant gap in the market upon returning to Canada post-COVID, which inspired the creation of Zaparus. Kevin's central argument is that the MedTech industry has historically operated about five years behind the more sophisticated pharma and biotech sectors, particularly in areas like regulatory strategy, sales processes, and the adoption of modern business tools. He observed that while the biotech space had numerous fragmented market intelligence solutions, the MedTech industry lacked a centralized, automated platform to provide actionable insights. Zaparus was designed to fill this void, using machine learning to analyze public data like press releases and identify critical sales signals. For instance, the platform can alert a cybersecurity firm when a medical device company enters the design and prototype phase, indicating a timely opportunity to offer their services. The goal is to move MedTech service providers from reactive, inefficient methods like conferences and word-of-mouth to a proactive, data-driven approach that boosts sales efficiency and effectiveness. The discussion also explores broader market dynamics, including the impact of regulations on innovation and investment. Kevin contends that, contrary to popular belief, stricter regulations such as the EU's MDR and IVDR can actually foster a more stable and predictable environment, thereby attracting more investment. The podcast underscores the growing necessity for MedTech startups to prioritize cybersecurity and commercial strategy from the outset. As investors become more discerning and regulatory bodies like the FDA increase their scrutiny, having a robust plan for security and growth is no longer an afterthought but a critical factor for survival and success. The conversation concludes by emphasizing that in an increasingly competitive and consolidating market, proactive planning and the adoption of advanced tools are essential for companies looking to scale, secure funding, and remain viable.

Key takeaways from this episode

Kevin Saem, founder of Zaparus, transitioned from a PhD in translational chemistry to creating a MedTech-focused market intelligence platform to address a gap he observed in the industry.
The MedTech industry has historically lagged approximately five years behind the pharma and biotech sectors in terms of regulatory sophistication, sales processes, and the adoption of modern tools.
Zaparus utilizes AI and machine learning to provide actionable market intelligence, helping MedTech service providers identify timely sales opportunities and move beyond traditional, less efficient growth strategies.
Stricter regulations, such as the EU's MDR/IVDR, do not necessarily stifle innovation; instead, they can create a more predictable and stable market, which attracts greater investor confidence and funding.
Cybersecurity is becoming a critical due diligence point for investors and a key regulatory hurdle, making it essential for MedTech startups to address it early in the product development lifecycle to avoid costly delays.
The MedTech market is experiencing a trend of consolidation, which increases competition and makes it vital for smaller companies to establish scalable, repeatable processes to grow and become attractive acquisition targets.
Adopting a proactive approach to commercial strategy is crucial for sustainable growth; waiting until sales targets are missed to seek new tools and solutions can be a fatal mistake for startups with limited financial runways.

Full episode transcript

Hi, welcome back to another episode of the Med Device Cyber podcast. Today we have a guest Kevin from Zapyrus and we're going to be talking about a little bit about market intelligence and how it ties into cyber security and we're excited to talk about uh his SAS platform which has changed marketing and the industry quite a bit. It's very uh very forward thinking uh because it's very focused on Medtech. So welcome to the podcast Kevin and you're coming to us from right outside Toronto. Is that right today? Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I'm super excited to to spend some time together and have some fun. Host: Awesome. Well, you want to tell us a little bit about uh your background in the industry, Kevin and maybe like what the impetus was for Zapyrus and you know, how things are going for you today. Kevin: I came from the research world, um, in the early days. So, uh, technical, technical space, right? Um, I worked, my PhD was in, uh, chemistry, technically, um, but translational chemistry. So I was focusing on the application side of things. So developing portable uh diagnostic devices, instrumentation, um nanofabrication, I was in the clean room all the time. Um, doing tissue engineering work as well, which, you know, we're starting to see a bunch of new cool companies come out, uh, through the innovation of those materials and and technologies, uh, out of universities. So that, that was kind of my roots. And then I I got super curious in the entrepreneurial side because um, through that work, I was able to have published some patents, you know, papers and things like that and and wanted to see, you know, how do you take it beyond that and create larger impact in in the community and the in the space. And that took me into the startup world. Spent some time in France working at a liquid biopsy, uh, company there. I was a chief operating officer there, you know, raising capital, doing all the fun startup stuff that's uh, or broke startup stuff that's, you know, pitching and begging for VC money and things like that. So that was like pre-COVID. Post-COVID came back to Canada and then, um, shortly after Zapyrus was born out of COVID and we've been scaling out ever since. Host: And what was the, how did you see like the need, uh, to start Zapyrus? Like, what was the, the reason you basically built Zapyrus? Like, what was the need you felt needed to be filled? Kevin: Yeah. So I so at the time, the... the I I look at the healthcare space as a whole, right? Healthcare space, we can break it up into pharma, biotech, and then we've got like Medtech, and then consumer healthcare stuff, right? And so Medtech from a regulatory sophisticated, like sales sophistication, company sophistication is historically has been, you know, five, minimum five years behind life sciences, like pharma and biotech, right? Um from a regulatory standpoint. Host: So so just to be clear, you're saying you feel like the Medtech industry is five years behind pharma for uh regulatory? Kevin: A variety of different things. Yeah, it starts with the regulatory and then, and then it bleeds down into the innovations, tools using the space, sales team structure and sophistication. um, just by the nature of investment into that vertical, you're going to get more, you know, polished systems and processes and companies, right? Uh, and so at the time, you know, in the biotech space, uh, there were a lot of cool solutions that help more efficiently and effectively connect um businesses together, B2B, right? Through market intelligence. And so there was this transition between, I guess, going to the library to get information to like the internet, the the Google Age and the, you know, Yahoo searching age. So the information age then, what was born out of that were traditional databases, basically digitized curation of information in a platform, right? And then you saw the emergence of like selling contacts. That was such a taboo, you know. Like there were firms that are just scraping people's contact info in the early days. Think about like ZoomInfo in the early days. They're, they're installing like crawlers in people's browsers and and like take contacts out of people's emails unwarranted, you know. And then regulation caught up and like, "oh, you can't do that anymore." And so now, and then all of a sudden overnight, their contacts' quality plummet because they're not allowed to like do that thing anymore. And so then it became the emergence of like the database platforms and then the contact search platforms, right? And this, these were all fragmented solutions that's aimed to try to help out the business developers and marketers in the the space to be able to grow their business more effectively. Beyond just going to conferences, shaking hands, word of mouth, and just like SEO marketing stuff, right? Inbound things.

1 / 9