26 January 2011

Shahid Azim ~ Lantos Tech for Hearing Aids, plus

Excellent to interview MIT alumnus entrepreneur Shahid Azim on MaximizingProgress.tv tonight. After starting and selling a offshore services business in Pakistan, Shahid came to the MIT Sloan Fellows program for an entrepreneurial sabbatical and connected with his latest venture! Together with MIT engineering professor Douglas Hart and other colleagues, Shahid co-founded Lantos Technologies to work on 3D imaging of the human ear canal to develop better-fitting hearing aids and related devices. Hart is perhaps best known for co-founding Brontes, the digital dental imaging company sold for a pile of coin to 3M. Now Lantos seeks to repeat this success in the arena of the aural. With MIT Deshpande Center support of $50K for primary research back in 2009, plus some market validation via the MIT i-Teams class, they proved enough to catalyze starting the company. Most recently they closed $1.6 million in Series A financing from Catalyst Health Ventures together with Excel Venture Management and Mass Medical Angels. I'm personally convinced they're on a pathway towards enabling radical transformation of the human-computer experience by enhancing our audio and acoustic environment. Sounds great!

P.S. As a blast from the past, check out this CNN story on Shahid's prior venture outshoring to Pakistan...

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