It's no secret that it's harder and harder for med-tech firms to receive early stage funding. I think my last six blogs have been about that topic alone.

But while its true that some venture capital firms are looking to invest in med-tech companies at a later stage in the development cycle, some firms are getting fairly creative and are going toward crowdfunding.

Last  week, I wrote a story about Amulyte (Markham, Ontario), a company that has developed an emergency response device that helps seniors live on their own terms, and its move toward the crowdfunding model. The company partnered with WeFunder, a recently launched Crowd Investing platform that helps early stage companies secure investment.

It was an interesting interview and Mike Norman co-founder and president of WeFunder spoke on some ambivalence that some companies might have toward going this route.

“Any time there’s a new innovation out there with something as critical as fundraising . . . people really want to understand how it works,” he said in an interview with Medical Device Daily. “We have had to make our model look as similar to existing fundraising as possible. One of the things that start-ups get concerned about is having hundreds of investors in the company with voting rights and they have to get signatures from these investors, which are just hard to track down in general, when they want to make large company decisions. What we do is we take all the investors that come in through the WeFunder and they invest in a single LLC that then invests in the company.”

He then said that because of this measure there is only one shareholder on the company’s cap table.

With this kind of model in place I have to wonder if med-tech firms truly want to keep up with the times and foster innovation, could they quite possibly think about crowdfunding as a means of early-stage funding?

We're in an era where med-tech companies that think outside the box could lead the pack in innovation. Could crowdfunding be the next logical step in achieving this goal?