Titan Spine ‘turns it to eleven’ (BizTimes)
With a proprietary surface technology and a runway of private equity investment, Titan Spine LLC has, to borrow a phrase from the cult classic film “This is Spinal Tap,” turned its growth up to 11.
The Mequon-based medical device developer was established after surgeon Dr. Peter Ullrich came up with the idea to make interbody spinal implants out of titanium instead of plastic to better encourage bone growth.
It turns out, he was on to something.
Titan Spine launched in 2006 and has since created a sea change in its industry vertical. Over the past 10 years, it has grown at a rate of more than 40 percent per year. More than 70,000 of its devices have been implanted, it has more than 50 patents and the company has grown to $63 million in revenue. Titan Spine recently raised $15 million in a private equity round.
Early days
In 2002, when he was working as a spine surgeon in Neenah, Ullrich was seeking a medical device that wouldn’t damage a portion of the spine called the end plate in an interbody fusion procedure, but there wasn’t one. He had identified a problem.
“We were doing threaded cages. They were titanium cages but they were round,”...
