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PhotoniCare Marks Five Years

Wow! Five years! It’s been an incredible ride for everyone involved in PhotoniCare. We are a passionate team and we rely on each other, our partners, advisors, investors, clinicians, and the community to help bring our technology to market. Thank you for making the past five years so great!

Check out our 5 years in review infographic

Our company was founded in 2013, borne out of Dr. Stephen Boppart’s Biophotonics Imaging Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). During the first two years of our existence, we were able to leverage resources available through UIUC and the NSF I-Corps program (both the Site program in Illinois, as well as the National I-Corps program) to further develop our technology and refine the market opportunity.

In early 2016, we hired our first full time non-founder employee and leveraged a $1.6 million NIH SBIR Direct-to-Phase II Grant, as well as funds raised from a friends and family financing round, to step out of the academic lab and into our new space located within UIUC’s Enterprise Works Incubator.

2017 was spent in intense product development and refinement. We also completed a 100 patient clinical study and continued to grow our team with the addition of five full time employees. The team also celebrated winning the Entrepreneurial Excellence Award as part of the Champaign County Economic Development Corporation’s Innovation Celebration.

This past year has been just as exciting, with new opportunities to grow PhotoniCare through participation in the MedTech accelerator program, winning the 2018 SPIE Startup Challenge, and the award of a $2 million NIH SBIR to fund ongoing studies and research.

We are proud to cross the five year mark and eager to kick off 2019, which is poised to be an exciting year for the PhotoniCare Team as we plan to launch our first product, the TOMi Scope [OtoSight Middle Ear Scope].

• PhotoniCare