Editor’s note: Startland News editors selected 10 Kansas City scaling businesses to spotlight for its annual Startups to Watch list. Now in its ninth year, this feature recognizes founders and startups that editors believe will make some of the biggest, most compelling news in the coming 12 months. The following is one of 2024’s companies.

Click here to view the full list of Startups to Watch — presented with support from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and independently produced by Startland News.

Recent energy surrounding healthcare technology in Kansas City makes the region an exciting place to build Love Lifesciences’ medical device startup — a venture that is reimagining the injection process, shared co-founders Nick Love and Bradley Hopper.

In October, Kansas City was designated a Tech Hub for vaccine development and biologics by the federal government, opening the door for as much as $75 million in funding. Then just a few weeks later, the Digital Health KC initiative was awarded a $2 million federal grant that was doubled by matching funds from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

“It’s phenomenal,” Love said. “There’s a lot of energy. “We work very closely with Digital Health KC, BioNexus KC, BioKansas, all these different groups because they’re the ones that have the contacts in the network to people that we need to be working with. A lot of our deep R&D products are digital health related and so they provide tremendous resources and support.”

“With the Tech Hub, while it might be for vaccines and biologics, biologics are all injectables; vaccines are all injectables,” he added. “So we’re an appropriate application for some of those funds potentially.”

Knowing there’s a future for their health tech startup in Kansas City is exciting, Hopper continued.

“Just the momentum that’s going on is fantastic,” he added. “And to be a small part of that, it helps us keep our momentum up.”

Founded in 2021, Love Lifesciences has developed a series of therapeutic agnostic, hybrid injection devices intended to assist patients that must self administer injections, Love said, aiming to reduce unnecessary pain — and the anxiety and fear it often evokes. 

“Why not take the best of both worlds,” he explained, “provide the benefits from the auto injector but strip away those pain points and integrate the control that syringes allow.”

RELATED: Afraid of needles? This Kansas startup just raised $1M to inject its no-show solution into testing

Because patients have control and the injector is not automated, Love continued, their device does not have to be redeveloped or redesigned for every new therapeutic that is integrated, a benefit to pharmaceutical companies. 

“Auto injectors right now have about five years in development timelines and cost more than $5 million just to develop,” he noted. “So what we’re targeting is stripping away that entire process for our small and mid-sized pharma companies that really don’t have the five-year timeline to wait and they don’t have $5 million to integrate an injection device that they thought about at the last second, frankly.”

Over the past year, Love Lifesciences has gained a lot of momentum, the co-founders shared. 

Nick Love, CEO and co-founder of Love Lifesciences, center, talks with fellow InvestMidwest attendees at the spring 2023 conference in St. Louis; photo courtesy of InvestMidwest

In July, they closed a $1 million pre-seed round, led by Kansas-based angel investors and the GROWKS investment group. Prior to the pre-seed round, they received a $25,000 grant from Digital Sandbox KC and another $20,000 from the Kansas Department of Commerce. Including other funds from its friends and family round, Love Lifesciences has raised $1.2 million in funding since its inception.

“Having that access to the capital let us tee everything up as we need to and then initiate it and run with manufacturing and FDA processes and things like that,” Hopper said.

Over the past few months, Love noted, the startup also fell backwards into an interesting sub-market, opening the door to talks with more prospective clients.

“As we’ve continued these conversations, our attraction has grown in these spaces,” he continued. “In the injection devices space, it’s a difficult process when you’re looking at some of the larger competitors who are working with Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, or Novo Nordisk. We’re a startup and we don’t have that proven track record.”

“It’s phenomenal traction,” Love added, “and it’s really pushing us along pretty far.”

In 2024, Love and Hopper said they are looking to wrap up FDA testing and submit their UniPen — single injection — device for FDA approval, plus have conversations with pharmaceutical partners about integrating the device into clinical trials.

“The hardest part about our industry specifically is the amount of regulation involved,” Love noted.

They also plan to launch a Series A funding round and continue to work on secondary devices like their MultiPen, a multiuse injection device that allows for time-gated access to injectables, which can prevent overdosing or underdosing on the injectable therapeutics.

Kansas City Startups to Watch in 2024

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