Greenfield tech company bullish on growth in health care, life sciences space
Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowBusiness is booming for a wireless technology company that started small in Greenfield, but has grown its client list to 600.
Sonicu provides temperature and environmental monitoring for health care and life sciences customers, including all pharmacies at every Indiana University Health hospital throughout the state to make sure each fridge and freezer is keeping medication and vaccines at the right temperature.
The company is led by two Greenfield neighbors and has put down roots in the city’s downtown at two buildings next to the historic courthouse.
Chief Revenue Officer Joe Mundell talked about the company’s growth in an interview with Business of Health Reporter Kylie Veleta.
“We’ve been doubling our revenues over the last couple of years, and we’re just coming off a record quarter for us,” Mundell said. “It’s been a fun ride, and I think it just goes back to the roots of IU Health and local hospital systems like Hancock and Hendricks that helped us build this foundation.”
Sonicu has developed wireless sensors and a cloud-based software platform that can monitor an environment and provide data to a device anywhere in the country. The technology will trigger an alarm if the temperature isn’t in the environment’s permitted range.
Additionally, the software records all of the data from the sensors and aggregates it into compliance reports for regulators such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“We help our clients protect their assets, valuable medications, vaccines, research material, and then we give them a regulatory compliance tool to make it easy to achieve regulatory compliance around those types of things in their environment,” Mundell said.
In addition to the IU Health pharmacies, Sonicu also monitors all of the research freezers at the IU School of Medicine, including at the Susan G. Komen Tissue Bank. And that work has led the company to bring in more big name clients such as Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and hospitals throughout the country, including VA medical centers.
Sonicu also touts NASA as a client. The company monitoring a few trailers doing remote work for the agency, and Mundell says that’s a common pattern; Sonicu will start with a small project for a client, and that grows into bigger jobs.
The company was originally founded in 2008 to design a device that could help NICU nurses in hospitals monitor sound levels. Mundell says that technology is still used in dozens of hospitals across the country.
The original founder sold the company in 2014, and the technology evolved to cold/frozen temperature, ambient temperature and humidity, air pressure differential, and carbon dioxide.
Sonicu recently secured its 600th client, and Mundell said he believes the momentum is just now starting to increase.
“I think growth is the the future of Sonicu, and we really plan for it,” he said. “We built everything here so that one day we could have that hockey stick kind of growth and we could still support it with the team that we built.”
The company has about 30 employees in Greenfield with more working remotely throughout the country. But the Indiana connections are strong; every engineer on the Sonicu’s technology team is a graduate of Purdue University.