Deal Flow

Entrepreneur moves onto bigger stage

Erik Wernevi’s Nordic Technology Group wins Rhode Island Business Plan competition, plans to launch new product by year’s end

PHOTO BY Scott Kingsley

Erik Wernevi, co-founder and CEO of Nordic Technology Group. His startup firm won the 2014 R.I. Business Plan Competition. He says Rhode island is a great place to work, to live in and raise a family -- and it keeps getting better.

By Richard Asinof
Posted 5/12/14
If you want to know why Rhode Island is a great place to work, live in and raise a family, folks may want to talk to Erik Wernevi, co-founder and CEO of Nordic Technology Group, which recently won the R.I. Business Plan Competition.
Wernevi and his wife, also an entrepreneur, moved to Providence two years ago. “In my mind, Rhode Island keeps getting better and better.”

Why is there no bioscience, life sciences or med-tech caucus in the R.I. General Assembly? The absence of legislative understanding of what’s driving Rhode Island’s innovation ecosystem and emerging knowledge economy translates into a lack of leadership in economic development. When will the state invest in a mentoring program for early stage companies – and not just startups – to help these firms scale up in their enterprises? Is there a need for a more transparent, more comprehensive research database that covers and maps the research results and funding for all the state’s economic sectors?
The premise behind Nordic’s technology is a way to alert caretakers – either at a senior care facility or family – so that they can respond in case someone needs help. It reflects a growing isolation within our normal day-to-day lives for many of our aging parents and grandparents, despite the omnipresence of electronic smart communication devices. Talking with a neighbor over the backyard fence has become an archaic form of conversation. One of the attractive features of Rhode Island is its smallness and closeness – the ability to function as a community of neighbors. Enhancing that sense of community – and neighborhood – will be a critical component of Rhode Island’s future innovation ecosystem – where the conversation is inclusive, diverse and connective.

PROVIDENCE – Entrepreneur Erik Wernevi is bullish on Rhode Island. No one from the Gallup Poll – nor the New York Times, the Providence Journal, the Providence Phoenix, Ted Nesi, or even Buddy Cianci, for that matter – has interviewed Wernevi, co-founder and CEO of Nordic Technology Group, about why Rhode Island has been such a great place to launch his startup firm.

The company recently won the 2014 Rhode Island Business Plan and a $45,000 cash prize. It’s the second business plan competition where Nordic has emerged a big winner: in the 2012 MassChallenge, Nordic was a “Gold Winner,” one of 16 finalists.

“I think sometimes Rhode Islanders give themselves a bad rap,” Wernevi told ConvergenceRI, citing the Gallup Poll that found it was the state least appreciated by its own residents. “For somebody coming from the outside, that’s very surprising.”

When Wernevi and his wife – an entrepreneur herself, founder and creative director of Luna & Stella, an online jewelry company, creating a distinctive brand that fuses design and meaning – had looked around for a place to live and work, they chose Providence.

“We looked around,” he told ConvergenceRI in an October 2013 interview. “We could pretty much [have chosen to live] anywhere. We liked what we saw in Providence. The innovations in the whole health care ecosystem; the great mix of academic institutions.”

[See link to ConvergenceRI story below.]

Wernevi had continued: “We’re firmly rooted here in Providence. We really like Providence as a city and a place to live, it has a great culture.” And, as parents with a young son, he continued, he and his wife, like all parents, are concerned with the public school system, but impressed with the changes underway.

Now, eight months later, Nordic is on the verge of launching its new product in the market: a software package using 3-D motion sensors to alert caregivers to changes in patients’ behaviors, geared toward an aging population and residents at senior living facilities. Nordic is currently conducting product trials at two Rhode Island senior care facilities – one profit, one nonprofit.

“In my mind, Rhode Island just keeps getting better and better,” Wernevi said, in an interview last week at ConvergenceRI’s veritable corner office, Olga’s Cup & Saucer, sitting outside in the garden. “When you relocate to a place, it’s been two years now, it takes some time to know how things [work], the lay of the land, so to speak. I would say it’s gone very quickly for us.”

Wernevi pointed to the exciting success of other startups, such as Teespring, Utilidata, IlluminOss, and Swipely, to attract new venture funding in the $20 million range. “That really shows how the ecosystem is maturing,” he said. “These success stories really help everyone; all boats rise with the rising tide. These companies have the potential to be the next 1,000- or 10,000- employee companies [in Rhode Island].”

Where smaller is better
When ConvergenceRI first bumped into Wernevi, the entrepreneur was sitting behind Richard Horan, senior managing director at Slater Technology Fund, in the audience at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, listening to a panel discussion, “Our Aging Population and Aging Brains: Medical, Home and Social Design Challenges for the 21st Century,” part of a health care showcase sponsored by the Technology Ventures Office at Brown University.

Horan, who introduced Wernevi to ConvergenceRI, had been engaged in an ongoing – and very helpful – conversation about Nordic’s evolving business model, according to Wernevi.

Thanks in part to Rhode Island’s accessible network of connections to world-class talent, Wernevi said he was able to meet and talk at length with the panel’s members – including Ara Khachaturian, the executive editor of Alzheimer’s & Dementia, the journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, and Dr. Richard Besdine, a professor of Medicine and Health Services Policy and Practice at Brown University.

Meeting with Besdine – who Wernevi described as being at the cutting edge of gerontology – and creating an ongoing conversation and working relationship, showcased an important advantage that Providence offered over Boston.

“In Boston, to meet with that caliber of people, it is more difficult to make the connections, it takes a much longer route,” Wernevi had said in his 2013 interview.

The evolving conversation with Besdine, who is involved with efforts to design the nursing home of the future, helped lead to Nordic’s current product trials at two local senior housing facilities in Rhode Island.

“The fact that they’re here, it’s so much easier for us to work more closely and collaboratively with them, to get feedback,” Wernevi said. “They’ve given us great feedback. For their residents, our system has helped them to get help faster.”

Working together collaboratively with Besdine and researchers at Rhode Island Hospital has also proven to be an invaluable resource for Nordic, Wernevi continued, enabling the company to move more quickly into the market with product trials. “This would have been much harder to achieve in a larger place [such as Boston],” Wernevi said.

Wernevi also pointed to the growth of MedMates as a place where entrepreneurs operating in the med-tech ecosystem can find common ground and a chance to talk and rub shoulders with each other.

“MedMates has been very helpful for us to connect with other people working in a similar space, where you can bounce off ideas,” he said. “Serendipity, or those chance moments, they happen more easily. MedMates has helped to facilitate that.”

In terms of energy levels for entrepreneurs in Rhode Island, Wernevi continued, “What I see is that the whole ecosystem is maturing. There are so many breeding grounds for entrepreneurs here now.”

The next stage
Nordic, which has had offices at the Founder’s League, is now looking for new office space, something less open that can be more protective of very sensitive technology, according to Wernevi.

While Wernevi believes that an entrepreneur with a good idea, a good team, good connections and perseverance will often succeed, he stressed the importance of business planning as a methodology for success.

“If you have a great idea, and a great team, you will get funded, one way or another,” he said. In terms of funding sources, he continued, “I think angels, VCs, governments – everyone can play a role.”

But there is an added value to business plan competitions. “In our case, we decided to go for business plan competitions, partly because, the first time around, for MassChallenge, we had nothing more than an idea and we believed in our idea. But we needed help, not just to validate the idea, but putting together a more coherent way of executing that idea.”

More than the prize money, with the in-kind services and mentoring, he continued, “We got much more [out of the business plan competition] than if we tried to move more quickly to get [our product] in front of customers, because it tested out concepts.”

Winning the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition has created a similar boost for the firm. “We wanted to validate our business plan concept, and we saw this as an opportunity to get feedback,” he said. “At this stage in our development, we wanted to preserve our equity for out long-term investors.”

The win by Nordic, it was a great – and surprising – outcome. “We didn’t expect to win, we really went in for the feedback, which was very, very helpful,” Wernevi said. “We went through four rounds of judging.”

The $45,000 in prize money was important – but so was the in-kind services and generous support the company received throughout the process.

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