Profile of Jennifer Ernst, CEO of Tivic Health
Photo by Tivic Health
Profile of Jennifer Ernst, CEO of Tivic Health
Tivic Health’s ClearUP, a medical device that relieves allergy-related sinus pain
By Steve Lamont
Jennifer Ernst is the CEO and co-founder of Tivic Health. This profile, based on an October 2020 interview with her, is part of a series to highlight founders of companies in the Sand Hill Angels portfolio.
Tivic Health is a bioelectronic device company focused on designing home-use products that are drug-free to treat chronic conditions. Their first product is ClearUP Sinus Pain Relief, is an FDA-cleared handheld device that treats allergy-related sinus pain using low level electrical simulation called microcurrent. The company was founded in 2016 and the first commercial offering of ClearUP was in September 2019.
Jennifer’s background in cutting-edge science
Jennifer began her career building hi-tech products with Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) which, in the last 50 years has been a world leader in creating computer technology-related products and hardware systems. PARC has become famous for developing many technologies we take for granted today, including laser printing, object-oriented programming, ethernet, VLSI circuit designs, natural language processing, optical storage, and much more.
She helped lead the business development and commercialization effort of the PARC technologies and drove millions of dollars of revenues from global business partnerships and licensing agreements. She describes this time with PARC as exposing her to the “world of science and possibilities,” with her role of helping turn those ideas into something marketable.
At her next job, Thin Film Electronics ASA, a public Norwegian company, she helped them grow from just eight people across four countries and three continents, to a $500M market capitalization. They started with the belief that the “laws of physics were not against us”. At Thin Film the marriage of logic and memory technology that would help fuel the computational revolution. By the time she left Thin Film Electronics was printing logic memory, batteries, displays, and some of the first fully integrated systems where all the components were incorporated in a single, thin sheet of plastic, and printed at high volumes. It was a great learning experience, starting with basic science, to the manufacturing infrastructure, to defining value propositions for various industries, while growing a company on the public market.
Determined to start her own technology company in 2015 she met a biomedical engineer who was tinkering with a unique invention that addressed sinus pain using low-current electrical stimulation or microcurrent. After learning more about the body’s natural electrical system and how it works with the sinus nerves, she envisioned the potential need and commercialization of what was to become Tivic Health’s first product, ClearUP Sinus Pain Relief.
Origins of Tivic Health
At the beginning Jennifer was eager to put her business experience to use at Tivic Health. She knew she was working with a novel technology that could dramatically improve people’s quality of life without taking more medication. She saw the cross-section of the sinus and bioelectronic markets and that the bioelectronic market was growing rapidly and the sinus category had not seen any real innovation outside of pharmaceuticals for years. In short, the marketplace was ready for disruption.
Applying the lessons from Innovator's Dilemma and Henry Chesbrough’s teaching about how to create and profit from technology, Jennifer looked for a way to penetrate the market before becoming a threat. She set out to build a multi-billion-dollar company in the shadow of a trillion-dollar industry by applying four principles:
Start where no other competitor cares. It will take 3-4 years before competitors would see them eroding market share.
Go where pharmaceutical companies have failed and there are no other robust solutions. Neuromodulation and bioelectronic medicine offered a new approach to sinus pain, and had potential for other therapies.
Compete where the pharmaceutical side effects are bad.
Just compete. By then your company can stand on its own.
Company Milestones
ClearUP is the first commercial product from Tivic Health and was developed from a rough concept to launch in just three years, a very fast timeline for any medical device.
Over the past three years, Tivic Health received FDA clearance, achieved ISO 13485 certification, and received CE Mark approval. They conducted robust scientific clinical studies to more deeply understand the efficacious results of the microcurrent technology on allergy consumers These studies have validated that this advanced microcurrent technology works on 74% of subjects with allergies and has also suggested some adjacent uses that could represent new markets for Tivic Health.
The company and ClearUP have won acclaim and awards from Last Gadget Standing at CES 2020, Digital Trends Best Health Gadgets CES 2020, TIME’s 2019 Best Inventions and CES 2020 Innovation Honoree Award. Tivic Health has successfully arranged distribution through Amazon, BestBuy.com, Touch of Modern, Brookstone, Hammacher Schlemmer, Sharper Image. Walgreens.com — with more significant distribution to come.
Tivic Health may be on the leading edge of providing drug-free, electronic devices to treat other conditions with a clear path through regulatory approval given their track record. Some future applications could include treating sleep disorders and PTSD. The trend is that consumers are taking more control over their own outcomes, so effective over-the-counter solutions will be in high demand.
Pragmatic and milestone-driven
From the outset Jennifer has been pragmatic and milestone-driven, which she views as being critical for a startup. In her time at PARC she learned the importance of identifying the biggest risks or unknowns, “the longest pole in the tent”, and then to focus on de-risking it. Rather than fret about “what if we are wrong?”, the pragmatic approach is to look at each phase, make the best decision you can with the information available, then adapt and fine-tune it as you go along.
One of the biggest challenges for a startup is funding. Tivic Health has successfully raised money through multiple rounds with a strong angel network, including Sand Hill Angels as the first non-friends-and-family round. They were helpful with funding, providing credibility for subsequent rounds with other investors, bringing creative ideas, and also offering advice and support throughout the challenges. Beyond securing the necessary funding, the next challenge for the team has been scaling the business responsibly and at an appropriate speed.
Building on sound advice
Jennifer believes the best advice she has received as a startup founder has been to focus on milestones. She raised money based on what she expected to achieve in 18 months, built a roadmap to meet those objectives, then worked to achieve them. She believes in the importance of open communications with her team and her investors. It boils down to: “Say what you are going to do; do what you said you would do; go back and tell people you did what you said you were going to do.”
She and the team have confidence in the future. They have all been through launches before in their past roles, and have survived turbulent times. Their board of directors has been supportive throughout product development. Having a network, including the support of Astia Angels, has been helpful to learn from the success and learning of peer companies.
Disclosure: Steve Lamont has invested in several investment rounds of Tivic Health, and his wife is an avid user of ClearUP. ClearUP is for sale here.