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Greenlight Guru announced its acquisition of Vertex Intelligence, a data science company that partners with organizations to develop custom artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI and ML) solutions. The purchase will allow Greenlight Guru to leverage machine learning to improve the medical device industry’s approach to all aspects of quality management.
The acquisition is a culmination of the companies’ 3-year working relationship. Founded in 2018 in Zionsville, Indiana by CEO Tyler Foxworthy and partners Ken Miller and Zach Cardwell, the Vertex team will form the foundation of Greenlight Guru’s in-house data science department.
“The acquisition of Vertex Intelligence enables us to help medical device companies achieve True Quality through proactive decision support across the entire medical device product life-cycle,” Nick Tippman, CMO, Greenlight Guru, said.
The acquisition also includes several patents that Foxworthy developed and submitted while working with former Greenlight Guru COO Jason McKibbin. he most notable patent was for the first use of graph-based machine learning in the medtech space, which Foxworthy was awarded by the U.S.Patent Office in March of this year.
This acquisition follows Greenlight Guru’s’s release of Halo, the world’s first AI and ML recommendation engine for medical device quality, including its first use cases as Halo for Change Management and Intelligent Document Management. The product provides quality and product teams with recommendations of items impacted by a change order and the real-time visibility needed to discover, assess and manage the impact of a change.
For decades the medical device industry has been held back by treating quality management as a costly yet unavoidable business expense, according to Greenlight Guru. A compliance mindset leaves companies in a reactive position, with quality departments’ primary functions being to meet minimum regulatory requirements and reduce costs of noncompliance. The result is a reactive industry that’s unable to embrace the proactive quality offered by modern technologies.
Management consulting leader McKinsey and Company said that AI and ML solutions like the ones developed by Vertex enable medtech companies to accelerate time to market, reduce quality assurance costs, and increase capacity and responsiveness of manufacturing and supply chains.
“We can’t achieve true quality without AI, and this is our way of planting the stake in the ground,” David DeRam, CEO, Greenlight Guru, said. “Bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in-house is the next logical step.”
