Mente Receives Colorado OEDIT Advanced Industries Award

November 16, 2023 - Mente has been approved for an Early Stage Capital and Retention award through the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) Advanced Industries Accelerator Program. The award supports Colorado companies commercializing advanced technologies that drive economic growth and job creation across the state.

Wes Hill was excited about the award:

We’re grateful to OEDIT and the State of Colorado for backing Mente at a critical point in our growth. This award helps us accelerate commercialization while building durable operations in Colorado.

What the Award Supports

This funding helps Mente expand the infrastructure required to deliver instrument-level tracking and tray optimization in real clinical environments. The core of our work is a new intraoperative data stream: we tag individual surgical instruments with RFID and detect their presence near the surgical site to infer usage. Because surgical instruments are highly specialized, each “use” event carries meaningful information about what the surgeon is trying to accomplish and what phase of the operation the team is in.

With that data, hospitals can build evidence-based “master lists” for each type of surgery and reduce instrument oversupply, which in turn reduces sterile processing burden and improves OR setup efficiency.

What this Enables for Mente in Colorado

The Advanced Industries award supports the practical work that turns a strong technical concept into a repeatable product: standardizing tagging operations, building scalable tagging and manufacturing workflows, strengthening go-to-market execution, and securing additional pilot customers.

It also reinforces what we think is essential for any perioperative technology to succeed: consistent implementation, reliable day-to-day operations, and results that can be maintained over time.

About Mente

Mente is a surgeon-founded company building a data-driven operating room. We capture instrument usage automatically, then use that evidence to help hospitals and sterile processing teams supply fewer instruments while preserving clinical functionality and surgeon satisfaction.

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