Adam Torres and Sasha Banjac discuss the Cardiovascular Tech Forum.
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Show Notes:
Listen to the Cardiovascular Tech Forum coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Sasha Banjac, Co-Founder, CEO, Pulsli. Explore Pulsli and the Cardiovascular Tech Forum.
Watch Full Interview:
About Sasha Banjac
Dr. Sasha Banjac is a physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur, currently serving as the CEO and co-founder at Pulsli. With an exceptional ability to transform ideas into successful ventures he is also the founder and CEO of the San Diego-based tech startup Royanis, and the co-founder and CTO of the Cologne-based health services startup Mediclix.
Dr. Banjac also serves as the Lead Scientist at the esteemed Kiel University, where he earned his PhD in Physics and published numerous studies in leading journals. Combining his physics background with astute business acumen, Dr. Banjac’s diverse skill set includes full-stack process optimization, data management, cloud & microservices, prediction analytics, data analysis, project management, product development, leadership, B2B sales, raising capital, and ESG risk mitigation.
About Pulsli
Pulsli is on a mission to improve the quality of life for Congestive Heart Failure patients using a clinically validated and patented solution that can be widely deployed thanks to its cost effectiveness and noninvasiveness. Their technology combined with AI-based pattern recognition can detect an imminent fluid overload in-time to enable corrective action to be taken in order to avoid costly hospitalizations. Pulsli focuses on accessibility, ease of use and patient engagement, and is set to deliver higher efficacy to medical professionals.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I am in Newport beach and I am at the cardiovascular tech forum.
And today my guest is Sasha. Sasha, welcome to the show. Thank you, Adam. All right to be here. All right, Sascha. So what brings you to the conference today? I’m a CEO of a med device startup, or actually I want to I like to call it healthcare as a service startup. And my product and service is on a mission to enable life with heart failure.
As a founder, you have to go to a lot of conferences, meet investors, network, look for partnerships. Yeah. And what’s really cool about this one is Two things. One, the first one is that it’s very highly focused on the domain we’re operating in. And the other one is that it’s close to San Diego, so I didn’t have to fly out.
I jumped into the car and thanks to no traffic, I arrived here in about an hour. So that was really good. That’s awesome. I’m heading to San Diego after this. So, man, we could have carpooled. Yeah, that’s my next conference. Later on today, I have a cover award tomorrow, too. So that’s funny. Awesome, yeah. So, you mentioned being a founder, starting a company.
Were you always an entrepreneur? Like, where did that start for you? It started when I was about 14, I believe. I grew up in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which got wrecked with a civil war. Yeah. And my family ended up Being in a rough situation, and in order to help myself, I started doing business. Hmm.
This was mostly in the IT services space ended up at about 15 developing websites and then software. And yeah, so figuring out how to sell something and create value has been pretty much, uh, along me during my whole life. Now, now, where’d you develop that skill set from? That’s interesting. When you’re talking 14, 15, I think I might’ve been selling baseball cards or something.
You’re creating websites. That’s amazing. Yeah. Well, I mean, back then you have to appreciate it was fairly basic. You know, we’re speaking about HTML and all of it. But, you know, being a 14 year old, the biggest challenge for me initially was to figure out how to say to someone, this is going to cost, whatever, 20 bucks.
Yeah. Taking us way back with that one. And my uncle helped me a lot. He, he run a TV, audio repair shop. So he taught me a whole bunch of tricks on how to stuff and actually sell and get paid. Yeah. So with time I became more and more proficient and I believe with a page, 16, my biggest clients had about 8, 000 employees.
Oh my gosh. I was really good at that. Well, apparently so. Yeah. I did end up being super bored with it though. And then everybody was expecting for me to go study computer science. I’m 18, 18 and a half, and then I switched overnight to physics. Really? Yeah. So. So. No sales in physics though. Wow. Yeah. So did you think that you would continue going the entrepreneurial route?
I’m just curious. Or was that like in your blood or just? I wanted to improve the world and I wanted challenges. At that point, I had the fallacy or I, Well, thought that high level physicists are compensated well, which kind of didn’t work. You’re correct. That was a falsie. Yes. Exactly. And actually after I finished the PhD I went first and slaved myself for one of the consultancies and then started doing business again.
And the really crazy part is that I realized that over more than 10 years, I was in a low key depression. for lack of doing business. Wow. It was like eating you. It was like just creeping up on you. You didn’t even know it probably in the beginning. Yeah. And I, I, there’s a point in my life where I thought, man, this was a waste of time.
You know, you got the PhD in physics, but I, as a person, even though I love science and figuring out how to solve problems I thought that my problem solving and business making skills at age 19, We’re fairly comparable to what I ended up having after the PhD in physics. Wow. So yeah, however life’s curious Mm hmm for my medtech startup.
Yeah, how did you get to the medtech side of things? So, where did this how did this play into it? How’d you fall into that niche cause these aren’t I don’t know if five to ten minutes are gonna be enough I’ll try to summarize it. You know, slaving myself for the consultancy. Yes. The motive there has been discover a valuable problem.
And I did discover one with one of the biggest banks in Germany. So I quit that firm and go and create a solution for that bank. And then I failed at selling to other banks. So I was, I was in a way at a crossroad and thinking, do I go back again into the industry and look for Problem to solve or do I modify my strategy and what I decided to do is create an outsourced software development firm That will partially work with startups And I will use this as a platform to scout for good ideas.
Wow So the medtech startup i’m currently running as a ceo and i’m the majority stakeholder in used to be a client of ours and I as we move forward and I understand what it is. And as I was so committed to solving this issue because of a personal pain in the past, I figured out how huge the impact and the opportunity is.
So decided I’m going to focus fully on that. Wow. And right now I’m in the. process of setting up another CEO for the software services business to fully focus on the medtech problem. Talk to us a little bit about the medtech problem in the current company and what you’re, what you’re aiming to achieve.
Well us being here at the cardiovascular conference. It’s very much related to that and specifically to the lives of patients with heart failure. This is one of the biggest unmet problems in, in the health tech space. It’s big in terms of the number of patients, 7 million. It’s also one of the biggest causes of hospitalizations.
We’ve heard numbers like 1. 5 million hospitalizations annually, 50 billion annually. And the reality is that if you could remotely monitor patients, you could. see when the therapy is no longer working and jump in and help them. So we know that this works because there are invasive devices that have been doing this for a decade.
Cardiomimps being the best known one and recently Cordella by Neutronics that got acquired by Edwards, who’s here out of OC. I believe Edwards paid about a billion dollars for Cordell. I don’t know the exact number, but them putting so much money into a solution that’s practically a better cardiomyops tells you how big the space is and the opportunity, how huge the opportunity is.
So that companies like Edwards are very interested in it. Well, what I want to do is in terms of the monitoring capacity, deliver something that exceeds Cordella and cardiomyems in a non invasive form, but I actually want to think about all the other elements and we are actively thinking about those, about elements that are requirements to be successful here.
And what I see often happening is that in the medical med tech space, very often there’s a huge focus on the technology and people. in a way, ignore the psychology of the patient. And they often also ignore the impact on medical workflows that the solutions have. So I think we’re truly unique in that we’re holistically think about every single stakeholder and in particular, how to engage the patient.
When you When you have an invasive sensor in yourself, you have, as a patient, already committed yourself to having that technology. So it’s kind of like investing into something and in that case, compliance is typically fairly good. I believe with cardiomyops, it’s about 85%, but on the other hand, when you’re delivering something that’s non invasive and very simple to use, You have to create sort of like a lock in mechanism that makes the patient excited about using the product and the service because otherwise it’s going to end up on the shelf and it will fail to deliver the value that it should.
Because they’re not using it. Exactly. Ultimately. Mm hmm. So, Pulsely, and I’m saying that correctly, right? Pulsely. Correct. Yes. So, give us a little bit of just you know, the rollout plan, like talk, talk about the vision overall and like where you’re at and where you, where you hope to be. Well, we are about a month away for the first 510k clearance for fluid measurement and fluid is one of the key parameters you’re interested to know as a doctor caring about heart failure patients.
Mm hmm. This 510K is related to our Gen 1 device, and the Gen 1 device doesn’t fulfill my vision in terms of user friendliness and patient engagement. And that’s why we’ve kicked off earlier this year the Gen 2 R& D, so we are expecting to finish the Gen 2 device this year. Mm. We’re fully on track there.
So that in December or January, we’ll start the extensive validation procedure with the hopes of getting clearance for all the measurements that we are doing by May or June. And at that point, we are going to look to facilitate our revenue strategy. The long term remote patient management element is going to take I believe at least 18 months.
And my hope is that early in 2026, we’ll be delivering commercially Devices and the service. Wow. To the patients. Wow. What a story. I’m just thinking about way back when from starting your entrepreneurial journey websites to growing it to physics, to your PhD of course, to ultimately, you know, now med, a med tech device that has the ability to literally save lives and, and to help people.
Like that’s, and I know I’m probably missing some things in between, but like now you’re literally working on a problem that obviously is a. great opportunity that’s a given or you wouldn’t be doing it as an entrepreneur, but also like the ability to save lives, the ability to help a lot of people.
It’s amazing. Yeah. Fully agree. And perhaps to give some comfort to the previous topic, you know, like physics being a waste. Yeah, it probably wasn’t to me. I always think that how did it tie in? Tell me the tie in because it’s never a waste. Exactly. It’s one of the biggest serendipities in my life.
Wow. So, physics is a very broad area, you know. I would say there’s probably a thousand domains where you can specialize in. What I specialize in is weak signal extraction and pattern recognition. And event onset detection. So these are very cu cool problems if you’re dealing with particles that are coming as radiation from the sun.
Mm hmm. You would like to know when a, a cloud of radiation is gonna hit the the Earth. Because you want to protect the satellites. Yeah. So that being said, I thought that was a waste of time. But in heart failure, you need to extract One of the weakest signals, reliably, and give something actionable to the doctors.
And practically what you want to do is detect the onset of a worsening event. So a patient will take between 20 and 30 days to from the point where the therapy starts failing to acute hospitalization. You want to detect it as early as possible. Yeah. So that. And then. Act so that the horrible development doesn’t happen.
Yes. And well, yeah, I pretty much as a physicist was one of the,
and so out of the thousand plus things, you choose the niche that you, that very specific, and then it just, it’s so crazy. And then you’re, and you just blew my mind, Sasha. That’s amazing. Thank you. And you know everybody’s talking about AP applying.
This is such a complex challenge, such a multivariable problem that you have
to solve it. And I’ll be honest there’s great guys in my, and girls in my team who from the implementation side work on this, so I’m no longer, in the implementation as well involved as much. But it’s, it’s another manifestation of how many solutions at the end of the day, come back to the core science that enables them.
Oh my gosh. So Yeah, no, I’m happy. I did physics. I bet you are now. And a lot of people that benefit from your work or I’m sure going to be happy as well. And just said the technology, the developments, everything else that comes from that’s amazing. I certainly hope so. Well, Sasha, thank you for coming on the show today.
I want you to last thing here. If somebody wants to learn more about postly or to the website or to follow or anything like that, how do they do that? Polsly does have a webpage, it’s polsly. com. I’ll be honest, we are very focused on the technology and not the website. I get it. Marketing and sales becomes an issue I believe next year in Q1.
So that’s where the things are going to be way more active than they are currently. We are fundraising, started to fundraise a couple of weeks ago. So If you’re interested to find out more feel free to reach out to me. I think I’m very easy to reach out via LinkedIn and very responsive.
And I’m just excited to deliver something like this in a non invasive form in a form that doesn’t It’s not going to mess up all the medical workflows and that will actually help patients regain their autonomy and feel better In spite of their condition. Yeah. Well, Sasha, thank you. And to the audience, by the way.
So I’ll put the links to to the, to Pulsely and everything else. And also to Sasha’s LinkedIn. What we’ll make sure we put that in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t hit the subscribe or the follow button yet, do that.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspirations. Bray, she to carry you along in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Sasha really appreciate you coming on, man. Thank you so much. Thank you, Adam.