Stryker Fires Up the M&A Engine Again

Stryker has completed the acquisition of Gauss Surgical for an undisclosed sum. The Menlo Park, CA-based company has developed Triton, an artificial intelligence-enabled platform for real-time monitoring of blood loss during surgery.

Triton has demonstrated improvements in maternal and surgical care through earlier recognition of hemorrhage leading to earlier intervention.

"Gauss Surgical's innovative Triton technology will help fill the void of quantifying blood loss to enable accuracy, early detection of hemorrhage and prevention of maternal morbidity," said Dylan Crotty, President of Stryker's Instruments division. "Our belief is that Triton technology will help improve the industry standards for quantifying blood loss in the labor and delivery department, furthering Stryker's commitment to improve safety and outcomes for our caregivers and their patients."   

The deal comes almost a year after Stryker closed on Wright Medical -  one of its biggest acquisitions in recent history. During a July earnings call, Kevin Lobo, Chairman and CEO of Stryker commented on the deal and said the company would be looking for tuck-in M&A in the future.

“We're only nine months into sort of the cash flow impact of buying Wright Medical,” Lobo said, according to a transcript of the call from The Motley Fool. “And so, as we announced at the time of the acquisition, we were going to focus on debt reduction and sort of tuck-in kind of M&A - And so that really is what we've been doing, and you've seen it over the last nine months, we've paid down just a little over $1 billion of debt this year. We'll continue to look for opportunities to do that as we move forward, but we're ahead of the schedule that we thought we'd be on for debt pay down. So that's good. And then honestly, our BD teams are working and looking at smaller tuck-in M&A deals which we think actually provide the most sort of shorter-term growth upside. And so, we're excited as they bring us new deals to look at sort of in that kind of size and category.”