Spotlight: Flywheel leaves science to scientists

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Editor’s note: Spotlight is an occasional feature about a company, entrepreneur, or business issue. 

Flywheel, a Minneapolis-based early-stage med-tech company, offers managed information technology services to life sciences, clinical and academic researchers with this simple pitch: “Do Science, Not IT.”

Underlying that low-key enticement is Flywheel’s powerful cloud-based data management platform that enables researchers to capture and curate data, automate processing, and collaborate securely within and among institutions. For all that, users say, Flywheel is easy to use and customize and its subscription model is cheaper than launching and maintaining a similar in-house platform. Flywheel works on public clouds such as Google’s or private ones.

Flywheel’s promise and its mission were enough to persuade Travis Richardson, who had joined the company in 2017 as a consultant with strategy, product management and research and development experience, to take on the chief executive role last January.

“We monitor, manage, support and update the infrastructure so they can focus on the science,” Richardson said.

Already in use at leading research institutions and hospitals after going to market in late 2016, Flywheel won a 2019 Tekne Award in the cloud computing category from the Minnesota High Tech Association. Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are among the disorders researchers who are using Flywheel are studying.

Flywheel entered Series B fund-raising in December after closing on $6 million in its Series A round in April. The company plans to move from the Highlight Center in northeast Minneapolis, where it shares space with parent company Invenshure, to offices near International Market Square, Richardson said.

Flywheel, which had more than 50 employees in December, last year grew “a thousand percent” in revenue and close to but not quite that rate in headcount, Richardson said. The primary challenge is growing fast enough to meet demand as it incorporates cardiac, oncology and other non-imaging data types and gains traction in artificial intelligence and pharmaceutical markets.

“Some of the opportunities we’ve seen are of sufficient size and scope that we need to make sure we keep up,” Richardson said. “But we seem to be doing a great job at it.”

A priority is building out a scientific solutions team of people who have expertise in scientific workflow and research as well as computer science to help customers apply the platform to their needs more effectively, Richardson said. That’s something customers have been requesting.

“We’re trying to make science better for everybody,” Richardson said. “It’s really cool technology with a really cool mission. You’re helping people solve some of the most human-impacting kinds of diseases … to make the lives of people better.”

J. Thomas Vaughan, professor of biomedical engineering and radiology at Columbia University, chose Flywheel to integrate data into the cloud from the university’s Magnetic Resonance Research Center. The center, which Vaughan directs, operates virtually with data from 18 magnetic resonance systems run by 142 investigators working at five research sites.

Using Flywheel cost 60 percent less than building, staffing and maintaining hardware and software for the center, Vaughan said. Flywheel worked with investigators to train them on using the system and computing, interpreting and downloading data as each needs.

“They were a godsend, they saved me a lot of headaches of trying to build this from scratch,” Vaughan said of Flywheel. “It’s worked extremely well.”

Dr. Geoffrey Aguirre, associate professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said Flywheel’s ability to curate data sets solves the problem of the reproducibility of research results, an increasingly significant concern among scientists.

Using Flywheel has been “transformative,” said Aguirre, a neurologist and neuroscientist who uses imaging technology to study how diseases of the brain and the eye affect human vision.

“We will use the [magnetic resonance imaging] scanner to obtain measurements of somebody’s brain and by the time we have walked back to the lab the data has been transferred up to Flywheel, undergone an additional analysis and provided some plots and graphs to describe the quality of the data,” a process that previously would have taken weeks, Aguirre said.

Q&A with Travis Richardson, CEO, Flywheel

Q: How supportive is the environment for med-tech companies in the Twin Cities and Minnesota?

A: Minnesota as a med-tech hub is a great place to be. We can find great talent. You have partners like the University of Minnesota, world-class imaging experts. It’s centrally located, and the Delta hub doesn’t hurt. A lot of our business is all over the country and all over the world.

Q: What would you add that would help?

A: More people who are trained in not only computer science but the relevant science. There’s an opportunity there to develop more talent like that because there’s a lot of activity going on here. In one sense it’s better than most places, but I’d still say there’s more that could be done.

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