Surgicure CEO on bootstrapping her way to founding a medical device company

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Irena King, founder and CEO of medical device company Surgicure Technologies. Founded in 2019, Surgicure now has four employees and raised $1.8 million in seed funding in March 2025.

King talked with Healthcare Brew about how she came to start the company, what her goals with the Horseshoe device are, and where she wants to take Surgicure in the future.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What was your journey to founding Surgicure?

I actually started the company while I was in college. I was taking a biotechnology class…and the class had the opportunity to look at this set of devices. That’s when I was introduced to what we now call the Horseshoe, which is a face-free airway security device, so it secures a life-sustaining breathing tube but avoids any kind of contact with the face, compared to traditional methods that rely on tape and straps that can result in significant pressure injuries and downstream complications. This device was originally designed by respiratory therapists at the Brooke Army Medical Center, specifically for their burn trauma patients.

I ended up interviewing clinicians and nurses. I was literally sitting in lounges of hospitals and learning scrub colors to identify who was part of what department so that I could come up to them, buy them a coffee, get their input on this. When I saw that there was an opportunity—not just in military practice but in civilian care as well—I ended up calling the Army tech transfer office, licensing the patent as a foundation for our work, and then bootstrapped my way to founding Surgicure.

What’s your business model? Do you sell the Horseshoe device directly to health systems?

We work with two specialty pulmonary critical care distributors, one of them being MetroMed for the Northeast, the other one being Med Alliance Group for the Midwest, mid-Atlantic, and Central US. We have about 60% coverage of the US through distribution partners right now. The rest we are going direct…and then government and military is another path.

Do you have any other devices you’re working on?

[The Horseshoe] is our flagship product. We commercially launched last year, so we’re actively working on getting it out into as many hospitals as possible…But we’ve gotten a lot of requests from clinicians, from nurses, from clinical inventors for a couple other products. So we’re thinking about what’s going to be next, with full intent of expanding our portfolio.

Where would you like Surgicure to be in a year?

We want to be in as many hospitals as possible. We really want to be able to help transform the way people see airway security.

We are the only securement device that has an intraoral component, so we are changing the perspective on how airway securement should function. A year from now, we really want to be the go-to device, especially for the burn trauma and critical care communities and these vulnerable patient populations that just haven’t had good options. Like I mentioned earlier, we’ve gotten some requests for other products in this space, so I would also love for us to have at least a prototype of our next device.