Turning Your End Users Into Key Investors

Lazurite CEO and Co-founder Eugene Malinskiy is a self-described serial entrepreneur. He had a successful run working in the IT sector, but has always had a passion for medicine. He even has experience working as a medic and has spent considerable time in hospitals throughout the country.

Eugene’s IT and medical skills came together when he received a Master of Science in biomedical engineering from Cleveland State University (CSU).

“I was actually able to combine both the things I was good at with my passion, into one path,” he says.

After graduating from CSU, Eugene launched DragonID, an innovative healthcare and engineering company specializing in medical devices for the fields of cardiology and orthopedics.

The idea for Lazurite and its bellwether ArthroFree product came to Eugene when he witnessed a physician's assistant, minutes before surgery was supposed to start, trip over a bunch of surgical camera wires in an operating room. The cords were connected to the surgeon’s handheld camera and light, both of which are needed to perform minimally invasive surgery.

“There’s literally multiple cables running out of the surgeon’s hand, [which is] holding this camera that takes the video from inside the body. There’s a light to that camera that provides light into the body. Multiple cables that are heavy, that are bulky [and] dirty, go into the surgical tower that’s across [the room] on the opposite side of the patient — and that’s been the same way for the last 50 years,” Eugene explains.

Eugene recalls wondering why there were so many wires.

“The year is 2014 [or] 2015. Why are there all of these cables and wires to the surgical tower that shouldn’t be there? Wireless surgery should be possible,” he says.

That incident led him to launch Lazurite and begin developing what would eventually become the company’s flagship product, ArthroFree, a wireless camera system for minimally invasive surgery.

Eugene leveraged his experience with previous startups to make Lazurite a success.

FDA granted market clearance to ArthroFree in March 2022 after only a three-month review — a quick turnaround for any medical device. It’s the first wireless camera for minimally invasive surgery to ever receive FDA clearance.

As of the third quarter of 2022, Lazurite has raised about $25 million across multiple fundraising rounds. After ramping up hiring, the company is working through the manufacturing and supply chain logistics to prepare for a full market launch for ArthroFree.

In this episode of Medsider, Eugene shares how planning out every step of ArthroFree’s regulatory and development process helped streamline the FDA clearance process, the importance of preparing for failure and being ready to solve problems, and why entrepreneurs should seek out investor input at every stage of development.