Intellijoint Surgical wants to prove Canadian medtech companies can grow on their own terms

What happened

The Kitchener-Waterloo-based company started as a fourth-year capstone project within the University of Waterloo’s mechatronics engineering program. Sixteen years later, it is building to stay.

Many medical device startups build with an eventual buyer in mind. Typically, these startups develop a technology and prove its clinical efficacy before selling to a larger company with the distribution muscle to take it further.

The co-founders of Intellijoint Surgical initially expected to follow that path. Armen Bakirtzian, Richard Fanson, and Hladio had set out to solve a problem that existed inside many operating rooms: surgeons performing joint replacements needed better tools to help them align implants accurately during surgery.