PROVIDENCE – Bionica Corp., a local startup that is working to create a new category of “personal communications system” for the hearing-impaired, has attracted a $250,000 investment from the Slater Technology Fund.
“The Bionica team represents an outstanding combination of design, engineering and management talent, ideally-suited to the challenge of bringing to market a fundamentally new technology for the hearing impaired,” Richard G. Horan, managing director of the Slater Fund, said yesterday in announcing the investment.
Founded by Design Lab Inc. principals Ralph Beckman and Kipp Bradford, the company was incorporated in January 2006 but traces its origins to 2005.
“We’ve been working on this for about two and a half years,” Bradford, the vice president of product development, told Providence Business News in a telephone interview. “It’s an offshoot of work we’ve been developing over the course of the last three or four years.”
“Nobody’s going to want to accept that they need a hearing aid – and that’s sort of the genesis … for the new company,” said Slater Fund spokeswoman Laura Nelson. “People don’t want to buy them until it’s too late,” Bradford agreed.
Industry research indicates that 5 million Americans use hearing aids, the Slater Fund said, and another 25 million experience hearing loss but do not wear one.
So Bionica has “deconstructed the whole concept … coming at it from the design-engineering perspective,” Nelson said. “They’re creating a new category.”
Their first product, the Clio, is due out late next year. The device “will work equally well in multiple hearing environments, including the car, theater and restaurant,” the Slater Fund said in its announcement. “Proprietary software will separate speech from noise and contain several different hearing ‘programs’ for various environments.”
“I think we’re creating a product that people will want to have, that will get around the stigmas,” Bradford said, adding: “We’re bringing a lot of current design engineering and technology to a market that I think hasn’t been able to integrate them.”
Innovative design is nothing new for either him or Beckman; that was their specialty at Design Lab.
Bradford, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in bioengineering at Brown University, had worked at Design Lab for the past 10 years, serving as vice president of engineering for the past four. He also has served as co-founder and chief scientist at dental diagnostic startup Q-Labs and co-founder of Dewhurst Solution LLC. Of his work at Design Lab, he said last fall, “My practice combines electronics, computer hardware, and software development, all in the context of solving real world problems specifically, toy design and medical devices.”
Beckman has more than 35 years experience as an architect, engineer, product designer, inventor and entrepreneur. Before founding Design Lab in 1986, he was founder and CEO of Aeolian Kinetics Inc., a designer and maker of scientific instruments and data acquisition hardware. He also was a principal in prize-winning architectural firm Beckman, Blydenburgh and Associates, responsible for projects including the Davol Square Marketplace and Brown’s Urban Environmental Laboratory. In addition, Beckman has consulted for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Energy and NASA.
He studied engineering, architecture and industrial design at the University of Michigan and the Rhode Island School of Design, and has lectured and served as a studio critic at both RISD and Brown.
Asked about the old company, Bradford said, “At the moment, it’s in limbo, because all the employees at Design Lab are working full-time at Bionica.” The new company is leasing space from the old – an arrangement he said “allows us to use the appropriate amount of resources.”
The Slater investment, he said, will be used for “continuing our research and design, our patent work, market research … ongoing product development.”
The company also has received money from local angel investors, Bradford said. “We are actually in conversations with local angel groups and other funding sources.”
“Bionica is very pleased to have received the support of the Slater Technology Fund,” ,” CEO Peter Hahn – who previously served as president of U.S. operations at Oticon, the world’s third-largest hearing-aid maker, and at one time served as chief operating officer for Lincoln-based QualityMetric – said in a statement. “Not only do we appreciate the financial aspect of Slater’s commitment, but we also know that Slater will provide our young company with important business contacts within the Rhode Island community.”
Added Slater Fund’s Horan, “With the leadership and innovative technology being brought to bear, and the size of the market opportunity being addressed, we believe that the company has the potential to become a substantial business enterprise.”
A longer version of this article will appear in the July 2 print edition of the Providence Business News.
The Slater Technology Fund, established in 1997 by then-Gov. Lincoln Almond and the R.I. General Assembly, provides seed capital to technology-based businesses in Rhode Island. Additional information is available at www.slaterfund.com.
To learn more about Bionica Corp. and its founders, visit www.bionicahearing.com.
