Heart pump is ‘injected’ into the body

MONTREAL – Former Liberal leadership candidate Frank Baylis, one of Canada’s most successful health sciences entrepreneurs, has co-led a $43-million investment into an innovative Montreal heart pump maker through his private investment company.

KF Matheson Investment Holdings – the family office for Mr. Baylis and Kris Shah – invested alongside Desjardins Capital in Puzzle Medical Devices Inc., which has developed a heart pump that can be injected into the body without requiring open heart surgery. Other investors in the deal, announced this week, include Lumira Ventures, Longview Ventures and BDC Capital.

According to the Globe and Mail, Puzzle received “breakthrough” designation for its device in 2021 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and did its first successful human studies with four patients in 2022.

Cordis-X, a cardiovascular-focused investment vehicle backed by Ajax Health, Hellman & Friedman, KKR and Grant Park Ventures, led its prior $34-million venture capital financing in 2023. Puzzle said it will use the latest funding for safety and efficacy studies and to hire staff.

“Given the current macroeconomic landscape, this funding is a true testament to the impact of our work, the dedication of our team and the unwavering support of our investors,” said Puzzle chief executive Jade Doucet-Martineau, who co-founded the company in 2018 with two fellow students at Montreal’s École de technologie supérieure.

Mr. Baylis and Mr. Shah, who are the executive chair and president of Baylis Medical Technologies, have made several small investments in the Canadian medical device space through KF Matheson. Puzzle is their third investment of $1-million or more, after funding Toronto’s Epineuron Technologies, Inc. in 2020 and Vena Medical last year.

Mr. Baylis said in an interview that the pair decided to invest before he entered the Liberal leadership race earlier this year.

“We’re trying to support the ecosystem in Canada, and there are some amazing technologies here,” he said. “Obviously I’m not well known in politics, but I’m more well known in the medical and business field.”

Mr. Baylis was a one-term member of parliament who was elected in the Montreal riding of Pierrefonds-Dollard in 2015. He placed last out of four candidates in the Liberal leadership race won by Mark Carney.

Mr. Baylis, who garnered 2.7 per cent of the vote in the race, later turned down an invitation from Mr. Carney to run in the federal election. Mr. Baylis had felt the political system needed to be reformed “to let MPs contribute much more than they’re allowed to,” and while he’s happy to help if the Liberals win, “I wasn’t open to going back just to do the same old thing” as a backbencher, he said.

Mr. Baylis has had more success in business. He and Mr. Shah joined Mississauga-based Baylis Medical three years after it was founded in 1986 by Mr. Baylis’s mother, Gloria, a Barbadian immigrant, to import and distribute medical devices. The two men had met during while studying electrical engineering at University of Waterloo.

In 2001, the pair pushed the company into creating and selling its own devices. In 2009 they sold a division that built instruments used to identify and alleviate spinal pain to Kimberly-Clark Corp. and sold another device program for treating cancers in the spine in 2016 to Medtronic PLC.

Mr. Baylis left the business to pursue other interests including script-writing, film production and politics. He returned in 2019, though his political past came up in a negative light after a Baylis Medical-owned company won a subcontract to make ventilators during the pandemic. Mr. Baylis later testified he didn’t use government connections to secure contracts.

In 2021, Baylis Medical made its most successful divestiture, selling its cardiovascular device business to Boston Scientific Corp. for US$1.75-billion. Baylis is now developing interventional radiology technology.