Geoffrey Thrope

Geoffrey B. Thrope is a neurodevice entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience spanning academic research, commercial product development, sales and marketing, and business development in the neurostimulation industry. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, a hub for neural-engineering research that has anchored his career geographically and technically. He is an inventor on more than 60 issued and pending neurostimulation patents and has published or presented more than 50 academic articles.

Before founding NDI, Thrope served as Vice President of New Business Development at NeuroControl Corporation, where he helped attract over $30 million in venture capital investment. In 2002 he founded NDI Medical as a neurodevice incubator to develop and commercialize neurostimulation products. Under NDI he established multiple ventures; its first exit — the sale of the MEDSTIM urinary-incontinence system to Medtronic in April 2008 (reported at roughly $42 million) — returned over 150 times the original investment to shareholders.

In 2011, Thrope led NDI's evolution from a pure incubator into a venture firm with the launch of the NDI Healthcare Fund, a roughly $20 million fund (seeded in part by Ohio's Third Frontier program and private investors) intended to back both NDI's own spinouts and external neurotechnology startups. Through this structure he has continued to spin out and finance a portfolio of nerve- and brain-stimulation device companies based in the Cleveland area.

• Invests almost exclusively in neurotechnology / neurostimulation medical devices, targeting large unmet clinical needs such as chronic pain, Parkinson's, epilepsy, stroke, depression, obesity, and Alzheimer's.
• Backs companies across a wide maturity range — from pre-seed concepts to more mature technologies — writing checks from a few hundred thousand dollars up to multi-millions depending on stage.
• Operates as both an incubator and investor: historically NDI invested in companies it helped build in-house, then broadened via the NDI Healthcare Fund to also fund external startups.
• Strong preference for Northeast Ohio / Cleveland-area ventures, leveraging the region's neural-engineering research base (Case Western Reserve University and affiliated institutions).
• Values a clear path from bench research to an FDA-clearable, commercially viable device — consistent with NDI's track record of building companies to acquisition.